


Don't Judge a Book By its Cover

by Mad_Maudlin



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Alcohol, Chess, Crossdressing, Handcuffs, Multi, Photography, Quotations, Rivalslash, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-23
Updated: 2010-01-22
Packaged: 2017-10-06 14:01:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 47,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/54437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Maudlin/pseuds/Mad_Maudlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We are all more alike than unalike.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tension

I blinked at the dark, smoky interior of the club. Strange lights flashed from odd corners; a band was playing something so loudly that the walls throbbed. "Um, guys, when you said we were going to have a 'good time'..."

Fred laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. "Oh, loosen up, Ron. You're sounding like Percy."

George snickered. "Yeah, the only time we brought _him_ here he nearly wet his pants. We had to do slave labor for a month to stop him telling Mum."

I goggled at the thought of perfect Percy setting in foot in this...place. It wasn't filthy, not objectively speaking, but there was something in the atmosphere that seemed to work its way under my skin, into my blood. Most everyone there was much older than me, I realized, or even the twins; how had they found their way here in the first place? "Are you sure they're not going to kick us out?"

George sniffed. "Ronald, please. The bouncers know us. We're safe."

Ah, yes, the bouncers: three trollish men in leather jackets and a witch who looked like she could bench-press any one of them. They'd given me a scathing inspection that would have put McGonagall to shame, but waved us through when George had whispered something in the witch's ear. I subconsciously stepped a little closer to the twins as we threaded our way towards a table; I had definitely not intended to spend the summer holidays club-hopping in Diagon Alley. I don't know how these things happen to me sometimes.

A house elf with a broken tooth, dressed in a sort of poncho made from dishtowels, appeared as soon as we'd sat down. It did not look nearly so cheerful or obliging as the house elves in the Hogwarts kitchens; I got the impression that, if Hermione were to offer it a S.P.E.W. badge, it would shove it up her nose. "What is sirs having today?" it asked.

Fred consulted a menu theatrically. "Ah...yes. I'll have the Confundus Cocktail, and George will have a Sex on the Beach, and for ickle Ronniekins...?" He looked up inquiringly.

I blinked at him, then looked imploringly at the elf. "Just water, thank you," I said quickly. I was _not_ going to get drunk with the twins, Mum would throw me off the roof.

George laughed. "Get this boy a screwdriver, my good elf! With an umbrella in it!" The house-elf nodded sharply and vanished.

I looked between my brothers, wondering whether I'd be able to tell if they were planning a filicide. "What's a screwdriver?" I asked timidly.

Fred waved his hand. "It's just orange juice and...something. Muggle drink. Not so bad." He looked around, frowning. "The house band's not in. Shame. They're pretty good."

"What are they called?" I asked.

"The Travelling Perverts."

"...oh."

This was _not_ how I'd intended to spend my holiday.

The twins began talking about the business, but the conversation quickly degenerated into gossiping about their former Hogwarts classmates, most of whom I had never met. I cast about for something to look at. The patrons of the club were...well, interesting. There was one wizard with a glowing purple mohawk at the bar, and another with a long chain running from his earring to the pocket of his robes. I caught several couples snogging enthusiastically, or perhaps doing more than snogging; and I felt a funny jolt in my stomach when I realized that not all of them contained a member of both sexes. I watched two men disappear into a corner together, and I could've sworn that one of them had had his hands in the other's robes...

A burst of raucous laughter, louder than even the throbbing background music, provided a merciful distraction. I peered through the shadows and spotted a group of boys closer to our age, some vaguely familiar, crammed tightly into a large booth on the other side of the club. They were gesturing loudly and generally making a nuisance of themselves. I had barely begun trying to wonder where I knew them from when a small, pale figure with platinum-blonde hair became visible among the weaving shoulders. I automatically felt my hands ball into fists. "Malfoy."

George looked up, quizzically. "Huh? He's not a Ravenclaw, you prat, and he certainly hasn't ever been Head Boy..."

"Over there. Look." I pointed, and both twins craned their necks. "In that booth. What the hell's he doing here?"

Fred frowned. "I know some of those blokes...they used to be on Slytherin's Quidditch team. Guess they're having a night out."

"Yeah...pity they had to come here, though. Ah, look, drinks!"

The house-elf handed me a large glass that seemed to contain nothing more innocuous than orange juice. It had a blue umbrella in it. I took a sip, and choked; orange juice and _something_, all right. Not necessarily bad, though... The twins snickered at me and toasted. "To the future of Weasley's Wizard Wheezes! Long may she wave!"

"Here, here!"

I clicked my glass with theirs and took another swallow. It didn't burn as much this time, though it made me feel unpleasantly warm in the stuffy club. Which was funny, because the drink was cold, I could see the little beads of moisture forming on the sides. I drank again, but the feeling just increased. George caught him out of the corner of his eye. "Whoa, Ron, slow downdon't want to make yourself sick."

"You can't make yourself sick on orange juice, stupid," I said.

Fred snickered. "Right, Ron, keep telling yourself that."

"What's so funny?"

"Nothing, Ron, nothing..."

I scowled at them. Dumb prats.

I had drained my drink down to the dregs when I noticed two black-haired girls in short robes and fishnet stockings. One had her hand on the other's backside, which I was pretty certain wasn't normal, and they were weaving their way through the tables, talking with some of the patrons. I saw them stop at the table with all the Slytherin Quidditch players, and heard more uproarious laughter; a moment later, Malfoy stumbled out of the booth, flushed and grinning like a fool. The girls ruffled his hair and steered him through a door in the side wall, occasionally catching him before he could trip himself up. I scowled.

Fred poked me in the arm. "What's the matter, Ronniekins, jealous?"

"Of Malfoy? Pfft." I downed the last few drops of my drink. "Drunken bastard can go make a fool of himself if he wants."

Fred snickered again, but as the house-elf refilled my glass, George leaned and whispered something in its ear. When the elf had gone, George said, "Hey, little brother, ease up a bit. Don't want to have to ask Mum for a hangover cure."

I snorted at him. "I'm not getting drunk..."

I kept glancing off at that side door, though. Wondering what the two black-haired girls were doing with Malfoy. Or maybe doing _to_ him. _Oh, stop that, Ron, it's none of your business whether he gets laid. Besides, he's Malfoy, do you really want to think of him as a sexual being? I thought not... _

I didn't think about it again until the band which was not the Travelling Perverts stopped playing, and a spotlight suddenly came up on a low stage at one end of the club. Fred perked up, but George glanced nervously in my direction. "Er, Fred, are we sure about...?"

Fred sniffed dismissively. "He'll be fine, George. I'm mean, he's seen Hermione naked, hasn't he?" He looked at me. "Haven't you?"

I shook my head. _Although I wouldn't mind the chance..._

The twins looked uneasily at each other.

However, just then the band struck up a song with a throbbing, pulsating beat, and the curtains opened. On the other side was a slight figure in a gaudy, sparkling cape and high-heeled shoes. My jaw dropped when the figure turned around; it was Malfoy. Or someone who looked very much like Malfoy at least, with wild, tousled hair and elaborate make-up that softened his pointed features into androgyny. Eye shadow, glitter, and lurid red lipstick that stood out starkly on his white face. But why the hell was I looking at Malfoy's lips...?

The bandleader began to sing in a throaty tenor, and Malfoy lip-synched the words as he prowled across the stage, almost floating in that ridiculous cape. __

How do you do, I  
see you've met my  
faithful handyman.   
He's just a little brought down, because   
when you knocked  
he thought you were the...candyman.

Suddenly Malfoy flung the cape off in one smooth motion, and I forgot how to breathe. There were several appreciative yelps and whistles from the house, and Fred began to laugh uncontrollably. Malfoy was wearing a black leather corset, a goddamn _corset,_ and a tight pair of leather briefs that displayed his...anatomy, to great advantage. He also had on fingerless elbow-length opera glovesblackand the high heels were attached to thigh-high leather boots. By rights, he should've looked silly, or at least unbelievably fey. But somehow it all seemed to make just that much most masculine, more _male_, exposing the musculature that hard Quidditch training had given him underneath all that flawless white skin. Oh, yes, there was a _lot_ of that skin...

I watched, transfixed, as Malfoy stalked forward, swinging his hips in time with the beat and still mouthing the words. __

Don't get strung out  
by the way I look  
Don't judge a book by its cover.   
I'm not much of a man by the light of day   
But by night I'm one hell of a lover.

He slid his hands down the corset, hooked his thumbs over the edge of his briefs and thrust his hips, rolling his head back. Several women in the audience yelped or whistled. I swallowed very hard.__

I'm just a sweet transvestite  
from transsexual  
Transylvania

Malfoy prowled around the stage, posing, hamming it up and eliciting ever more encouragement. He began to pick at the laces of the corset, loosening then by inches, even as he continued to lip-synch.__

Let me show you around  
Maybe play you a sound  
You look like you're both pretty groovy  
Or if you want something visual   
that's not too abysmal  
We could take in an old Steve Reeves movie

"Who the hell is Steve Reeves?" George muttered.

Fred frowned. "What's a movie?"__

I'm just a sweet transvestite  
from transsexual  
Transylvania

Malfoy finally succeeded in removing the corset, and slung it off into the front row of tables. Now he was bare to the waist, showing off his narrows chest and a sparse thatch of pale hair. He produced a high-backed stool from the wings, slid his hand through the gap between the seat and the backrest, and suddenly straddled it. I realized my mouth had gone dry and took a deep drink of my screwdriver, keeping my eyes glued to the stage even as I broke out coughing again. __

Why don't you stay for the night?   
Or maybe a bite?   
I could show you my latest obsession.

Malfoy's hands began to trail slowly down his body, lingering over his nipples and on the waistband of the briefs. My mouth went dry again, but the drink was completely forgotten. __

I've been making a man  
With blonde hair and a tan,   
And he's good for relieving my...tension.

He raked his fingernails up his inner thighs, leaving raised pink scratches on the fair skin, and at the same time ran the tip of his tongue across his teeth, leering. I swallowed _very_ hard. __

I'm just a sweet transvestite  
from transsexual  
Transylvania

Malfoy kicked the stool away and turned, swaggering back upstage and signaling something to the band. They repeated the final refrain, and he picked up the sequined cloak and swirled it over his head dramatically for a moment. Then he did something that left a burning afterimage on the back of my eyelids, that I would remember with a surge of confused feelings later on, that would come back to haunt me:

He did the splits.

The band hit the last chord, the lights dimmed, and the curtain closed. There was enthusiastic applause and whistling, and a few people pitched Galleons towards the stage. I suddenly remembered where I was, and I was startled to actually find myself aroused by the whole performance. Licking my lips, I finished off most of the remains of my screwdriver in one gulp.

George blinked at me. "Whoa, Ron, easy! It wasn't _that_ horrifying, wasn't it?"

"I dunno, I think I'm going to have nightmares about that..." Fred chuckled. "Trying to forget already, eh, Ron?"

"Yeah," I choked. The room was spinning, but whenever I closed my eyes I saw Malfoy thrusting his hips, touching himself, spreading his legs impossibly wide. I tried to breathe deeply, but the air in the club was thick and smoky, and stuck in my throat. I needed somewhere to clear my head, away from the pounding beat of the resumed background music. I tried to stand up, but the floor lurched sideways, and Fred had to catch me. "Ooohhhh my..."

George sighed. "I told you you'd make yourself sick, Ron. Come on, I know where the men's room is..."

I straightened up. "I...I'm fine, really, I just..." I suddenly realized that there was a definite tent in my jeans. If either one of the twins noticed, I was worse than dead. "I just need some air," I blurted, and ran towards one of the darkened corners.

There were no less than three snogging couples back in the shadows, but, thank God, there was also a glittering sign that said EXIT. A half-dressed woman in one of the posters leered at me as I wended my way towards it. It came out at the bottom of a sunken stairwell, full of trash and standing water, but above me I could see the street lamps and the sign declaring this to be the corner of Seckshoe and Diagon Alleys. I could breath out here, at least, and some sort of charm kept the music from leaking past the doorframe. I sat down on the bottom step and cradled my head in my hands, trying to will myself back to normal. __

I am not attracted to Malfoy. I am not aroused by Malfoy. Not even if he's strutting around in come-fuck-me boots and a leather thong. I drank too much orange juice. This will all go away...

I repeated this mantra several times over, taking great gulps of the cool night air. I almost had myself convinced when a dark shadow fell over me, from something standing between me and the flickering yellow street lamp. I started to look up, but my brain jammed the moment I saw the bottoms of two high-heeled come-fuck-me boots before me. Oh, _god..._

From above, Malfoy's amused voice said, "Enjoy the show, Weasley?"

I leapt to my feet. Malfoy was at least dressed again, in trousers, a blue cloak and an overlarge shirt, but he had left on the gloves and make-up as well as the boots. There was a thin sheen of sweat on his face and neck, and his hair was still wild. He smirked and pointed one foot forward. "You like these? Gift from the management."

I backed against the wall and began to move to the side, trying to get back to the door. "You did a wonderful job embarrassing yourself, Malfoy. I'll be sure to write the Daily Prophet about it."

Malfoy gave a throaty chuckle. "I'm not the one who should be embarrassed, Weasley."

I didn't catch his meaning until Malfoy closed the gap between us, pinning me against the wall, and I felt my erection press into his leg. I tried to push Malfoy away, but he pinned my wrists and pressed himself even closer. With those boots on, we were nearly the same height, and I could look straight into luminous gray eyes narrowed with amusement and line with glittering purple powder. "So I suppose the answer is yes, you did enjoy it."

That goddamn drawl should not be allowed to sound _seductive. _"Let go of me, Malfoy," I gasped, but it sounded more panicked than threatening.

He grinned, teeth shocking white when framed by his vivid red lips. "That's not what you want, is it?" he whispered, and suddenly pressed those same painted lips to mine.

Shock, sensation, and probably the two screwdrivers in my bloodstream kept me rooted to the spot. I was excruciatingly aware of the shape of the body pressed against mine, the commanding and almost rough motions of his lips, and the soft slide of satin as Malfoy released my hands in order to cup my face. Even if I'd had the room to move, I couldn't have willed myself away from him at just that moment; my brain locked down everything more complex than pure instinct, which is probably why grabbed at his cloak and leaned into the kiss.

My reward (or possibly punishment) was to feel Malfoy's lips part, and a soft tongue suddenly probe my mouth. I let it in, and felt a strange slow thrill as Malfoy explored further. He tasted sour, like alcohol, and something citrus. Maybe limes. I leaned in closer still

and was suddenly shoved back against the wall, hard, so that my head hit stone and I saw stars. Malfoy peeled himself away, smiling enigmatically, like the cat the moment before it got the canary. Without words, without anything more, he spun and went back inside, swinging his hips at if he were still on stage. I watched him until the door cut off my vision, and then I slowly sank to the ground. I was randy as hell and completely confused and rapidly growing nauseated. All rational sense said that that couldn't have been real, and yet...

"Oi, Ron? You out here?"

The twins appeared, and I groaned. I really did not need them to see me like this. George looked down, and clucked his tongue. "I _told_ you to slow down...ah, well, better luck next time." He offered me a hand to help me up; I ignored it, and tried to figure out how I could stand by myself while keeping my legs crossed. I was halfway upright when Fred suddenly start snickering and elbowing George in the ribs.

"Looks like we interrupted something, didn't we? Hope we didn't scare off your lady friend, Ronniekins..."

I blinked at them, then touched my tingling lips. My fingertips came away stained almost blood red; Malfoy's lipstick had come off all over me. I could feel my face rapidly turning the same color.

George snickered, too. "Did you at least get her name, Ron? 'Cause that's very important, later, in case you get any rashes, to have her name...did you?"

"Yeah," I said, staring at my fingers. "Yeah, you could say that."

They chuckled some more, and tried to heave me up by my armpits, but my stomach clamped down and said _no._ I groaned. "Fred, I'm going to...I'm going to..." They barely had time to leap out of the way before I threw up right there on the ground.

George cleaned up after me while Fred walked me back to the Leaky Caldron; when it became I clear I wasn't going to tell him about my "lady friend," he launched into a monologue about sex, nothing of which I hadn't already heard before from Seamus Finnigan. He bought me some soda water to settle my stomach, and also a paper bag, for when we Flooed home, "just in case." I sat at the bar with my head in my hands, trying not to think about "just in case," or lipstick, or kissing or screwdrivers or sex, and most of all, about Malfoy doing the splits...

Damn.


	2. Preparation (Interlude I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gryffindors are not afraid of women's clothing.

"Oi, Ron! It's time!"

I groaned and shut my Muggle Studies book. Of course it was time. I opened the bed curtains and scowled at a thoroughly over-excited Seamus Finnigan, and beyond him, Harry, Dean, Hermione and Ginny. Neville seemed to be trying discretely to leave. "Can I at least finish my homework, first?"

Hermione glared. "This is going to take time, Ron, we should get started as quickly as possible. We don't want to be late..."

"Fine," I sighed, and stood up. "But one of you has to finish my bloody Muggle Studies essay for me."

Ginny rolled her eyes. "I don't see what you're always moaning about, Ron, I've never had trouble with that class...now, come on, we can do this in the bathroom..." She picked up a large, bulging shoebox held together primarily by Spellotape and old hair elastics, and gestured in an almost threatening manner to the door.

I watched that box uneasily. "I don't see why I have to do this," I muttered.

Harry shrugged. "You picked the short straw."

"That was rigged and you know it."

Dean said, "Come on, Weasley, one of us had to enter."

Seamus beamed. "It's about upholding the honor of Gryffindor!"

"It's about my brothers offering you twenty Galleons a piece to get pictures."

Harry flushed. "So, you, ah, saw that letter, did you?"

I shook my head. "You're all mental. And I still want to know why you elected me."

Seamus smirked. "You've got the figure for it. And, besides, who better to represent Gryffindor in a drag show than the tower's resident fag?"

I felt my face go red, and clenched my fists to forestall any attempts at strangling the little Irish son of a bitch. Luckily, everyone else in the room teamed up to give him such a murderous glare that he looked almost as uncomfortable as Nevlle. "Er, I'll just start on that Muggle Studies paper for you, shall I?" Seamus said quickly.

"And when you're done with that, you can finish my Charms homework," I muttered, and bolted into the bathroom.

Hermione and Ginny followed me in, carrying what looked like supplies for an entire dance company between them. "Seamus Finnigan is such a...a...ooo!" Ginny fumed, dumping that threatening-looking shoebox into a sink. "I can't believe he actually _said _that."

Hermione rolled her eyes. "I'm sure he just wasn't thinking. Nothing unusual."

I shook my head and leaned against the wall. "I brought it on myself. I should've known better."

"_Justin _should have known better, too, Ron," Hermione said, as she fussed with a large plastic bang suspended from a clothes hanger. "Besides, you know it doesn't matter to any of us..."

"It matters to Neville," I said, staring at the tiled floor. "He looks like he expects me to rape him at any second."

"That's Neville's problem, not yours...Gin, there's a lint brush in one of those boxes there..."

"It was just _snogging!_" I blurted, pounding my fist on the edge of the other sink. "Just kissing and stuff! Why the hell is everyone acting like it's the end of the goddamn world?"

"Because people are stupid," Ginny announced. "What did you do with all that Sleekeazy's, anyway?"

"Nobody's freaking out about Justin," I muttered, massaging the side of my hand.

Hermione sucked in air through her teeth. "It's in the same box as the hairbrushes. Ron, I think most of our year had Justin figured out from the beginning. There's nothing interesting about _him_ getting caught with another boy..."

"So I'm interesting, am I?" I picked on the sleeve of my robes, where Pig had torn a small hole. "Well, that's good to know..."

I blamed Malfoy for the whole thing. Malfoy, and his goddamn little dance. If it hadn't been for him, I never would've even thought about boys like that...and if I he hadn't been going on this whole year so far like nothing had ever happened, I wouldn't have been looking around for proof that it _had_...and, ultimately, would not have ended up in Greenhouse Two with Justin Finch-Fucking-Fletchly. _On the bright side, I haven't gotten any Howlers yet, so Mum and Dad must not know..._

"We're ready to begin."

I looked up, and felt a knot of fear form in my stomach. Ginny, my beloved little sister, was standing before a line of jars, bottles and brushes arrayed like surgical tools. They had covered the mirrors with sheets. Hermione, my long-time friend, former girlfriend, and all-around trustworthy person, was holding a contraption festooned with the sort of straps, laces and buckles one usually associates with instruments of torture. "Am I going to have to put that thing on?" I asked, pointing.

"Yes," Hermione said, "but first you've got to put on these." She tossed me a wad of black fabric, which I dropped the moment I figured out what it was.

"Hermione, I may be wearing a dress, but I will _not_ wear women's underpants."

She sucked air through her teeth again. "Those aren't just any underpants, Ron. I've charmed them. To help de-emphasize your...ah...anatomy."

"To hide your prick," Ginny translated.

Hermione flushed pink. "Ginny!"

"What? He's sixteen years old, Hermione, he knows he has one..."

_"Ginny!" _I felt myself going red again.

She rolled her eyes. "Oh, come _on,_ Ron, we all know you're a boy in here, there's no reason to be coy about it."

I glared at her. She batted her eyelashes.

"The whole point of the drag show," Hermione said, as if she hadn't stopped, "is to fool the judges. You're not going to fool anybody if they can see your...your _manhood_ through the dress. Oh, be _quiet_," she hissed, as Ginny had broken out in giggles.

I snatched up the panties and glowered at them. "Fine. But you two are going to pay for this later."

"That's fine," Ginny gasped, "we'll have plenty of money once Bill pays us for the pictures-"

After a moment's consideration, I jumped into the shower and drew the curtain. "And after this I put on the Iron Maiden thingy, yes?"

"It's a bra, Ron, a strapless and backless bra."

"Of course. How silly of me. You realize I haven't got anything to put in the bra, right?"

"Leave that to us."

I folded my jeans over the side of the tub and took a deep breath. _Gryffindors are brave, Gryffindors are courageous, Gryffindors are not afraid of women's underwear._ Secure in this thought, I shucked my boxers and put on the panites. They were extremely...ah..._snug_.

"Okay," I said, "I've got them on. Hand me the Iron Maiden."

"It's a _bra..._"

"Not so fast," Ginny said. "Let us have a look at you."

"Are you _insane?"_

"Ron," she said slowly, "I am your sister. We used to take baths together, remember? There's nothing there that I haven't seen before."

"I know _that..._"

Hermione giggled. She should not be allowed to, ever again. "If you're that scared, Ron, I'll shut my eyes."

"I'm not scared, I'm just... mostly naked," I said, failing to sound even the least bit convincing.

Ginny giggled again. She shouldn't be allowed either. "This is getting ridiculous, Ron, you'll have to come out eventually." I suddenly found the curtain ripped open, and in a moment of blind panic, totally forgot where I would rather place my hands.

Ginny doubled over laughing; Hermione, thankfully, just frowned at me. "I thought I told you to shave."

"I did shave!" I pointed at my jaw. "See? I even got my sideburns even this time!"

She sighed. "That's not where I meant, Ron..." It must've been obvious that I had no idea where she had meant, because she drew her wand. "Don't worry, I'll just cast a simple Hair-Removing Charm..._depilaro!_"

Before I had time to explain that I didn't _want_ any more hair removed, thank you, I felt a moment of something like static shock all over my body. I looked down. There was quite a lot of ginger hair in bottom of the tub, and not much left on my skin. I checked my scalp to make sure I hadn't gone bald, then glared at Hermione. "You could try _warning _a bloke before you do that!"

She rolled her eyes. "Come here, Ron. We have to get you dressed..." She picked Ginny up off the floor and handed her half of the Iron Maiden. "This is charmed, too, so don't be, ah, alarmed at anything..."

"What am I going to have to be alarmed _at?_" I asked.

They tellingly ignored the question.

It was as awful as it looked to get on. I held my arms over my head, shut my eyes, and prayed for death. Eventually they stopped yanking on things; finally, I heard a zipper snick shut, and opened my eyes. "Is it over?"

Hermione was already on the other side of the room, fiddling with something tan and horrible-looking. "Yes, you big baby."

I crossed my arms indignantly. "I am not a big...baby...the hell?" The cups of the Iron Maiden were full of..._something_s. They certainly felt like breasts. They looked like breasts. I bounce slightly on the balls of my feet and they _moved_ like breasts. I peered under the edge, but there was nothing between my chest and the fabric, except quite a bit of empty space. "This has officially passed from embarrassing to deeply disturbing."

"Well, perhaps if you'd actually participated in planning this..." Hermione handed me two horrible tan thingies, and a fistful of little straps. "Those are stockings and garters. I presume you can figure them out by yourself?"

I glared at her and put them on. It was bizarre not to feel any hair on my legs as I did so. I even managed to put on the garters properly, despite several false starts and a few sacrastic offers of help from Ginny. I was just about to point this out to Hermione when I noticed she had removed the plastic bag from the clothes hanger. I noticed what was left _on_ the clothes hanger. "I...Herm...you don't expect me to _wear_ that, do you?"

She gestured rather threatening with her lint brush. "What's wrong with it?"

"It...it's _indecent!_"

Ginny smirked. "That's the point."

I tried to glare at her, but I was too incredulous. "Virginia Weasley, get those thoughts out of your head right this minute, because even if you do get the dress once I'm done you'll never leave the house in it."

She pouted.

Hermione appeared to be counting to ten, backwards, in Greek. "Ron, there are three options before us. One, you put on this dress that we have so painstakingly picked out for you. Two, you go to Hogsmede wearing little more than what you have on now. Three, we Stun you and dress you ourselves."

I shut my eyes and took a steadying breath. _Gryffindors are not afraid of women's clothing!_ "Give it here, then. And put your wands away."

The dress was red. The dress was short. The dress was almost as snug as the underpants. I slipped it over my head and wriggled a bit to get it over the Iron Maiden; it barely covered my garters. Hell, it barely covered _anything_. "I'm not just dressed like a woman, I'm dressed like a _loose_ woman..."

"Oh, quit moaning and sit down. We have to do your make-up."

I sat down on a toilet, as there was no place else. Hermione drew her wand again. "Just close your eyes and it'll be over in a minute," she said. "And cross your legs." Over by the sinks, Ginny was selecting arcane make-up thingies with a mien that reminded me inexplicably of Professor Snape. I shut my eyes.

_"Crinitus!"_

My scalp began to itch. I immediately touched it to make sure I wasn't bald, but I definately felt hair there...more than there ought to be...and it suddenly it was tickling my shoulders, and then my back... "I thought you were getting me a wig!"

"The charm is so much more effective, Ron. And besides, we can always cut it tomorrow morning."

I heard Ginny drop something over by the sinks. "Or you could just leave it like that, and make Bill jealous."

When my scalp stopped itching, I reached around my back. My hair now came to a halt just below my waist. "Hermione, all of these charms are reversable, right?"

"Don't you trust me?"

"That doesn't answer my question."

"Yes, Ron, I can fix them all. In fact, if you're so worried, I can use a time-delayed version of _finite incantatem,_ so you'll turn back into a pumpkin at midnight."

"I'll _what?"_ I jumped to my feet.

Hermione winced. "It's just an expression."

"You're turning me into a _pumpkin?"_

"I just said..."

"I never agreed to any pumpkins!"

Even Ginny looked worried. "Hermione, you never mentioned pumpkins before..."

She through her hands in the air. "It's an _expression,_ it's a _Muggle _thing! I just meant that all the charms would disappear, you'd go back to being a normal, hairy boy in tight underwear with no boobs!"

"And what's any of that got to do with pumpkins?"

She sighed. "Never mind. Just...never mind. Sit down, please, you're _looming_."

I sat down. Bloody Muggles and their bloody nonsense sayings... "So I will go back to normal, then, yes?"

"_Yes!_ Now hold still."

I sat on the toilet for what felt like hours. The girls did _things_ to me. I felt the touch of brushes and sponges on my face, wet and dry, firm and feather-light. They combed my hair. They put on lipstick. Just _things._

"All right, how about this color?"

"Too dark. He'll look anemic."

"Maybe if we mixed it with this?"

"Could work...oops."

"_Oops?!"_

"Calm down, already, Ron..."

"This is my face you're oopsing at!"

"Ron, what you don't know can't hurt you. Hold still."

"...oops."

"What now?"

"I can fix that..."

Hermione tapped me on the shoulder. "Open your eyes. I don't want you squirming for this part."

"Then quit doing things that make me squirm..."

She held up a fat black pencil with a greasy-looking lead. "This is eyeliner. I'm going to put it on you. That means I have to draw on your eyelids."

"No."

_"Ron!"_

"You already threatened to Stun me and to turn me into a pumpkin, and you think I'm going to let you stick something pointy in my eye?"

She looked helplessly at Ginny. "Will you let her do it? She's your sister, after all..."

"She's also the one who kept saying 'oops.'"

Hermione hissed through her teeth. "Oh, this is ridiculous..._petrificus totalus!"_

There was no helping it; my wand was with my real clothes on the edge of the tub, and she was standing at point-blank range. I flopped onto the floor in a Full-Body Bind, and could only glare while she leaned over and started drawing on my face. "I suppose I might as well do you nails while you're down there," Ginny said helpfully, and hunkered down with her wand and a bottle of enamel. I glared at her, too.

When they finally lifted the curse, I sat up and massaged the back of my head, noting that my fingernails were now long and lacquered bright red. "That was hardly necessary."

"We had to get it on you somehow..." Hermione brushed herself off, passed Ginny the lint brush and opened the bathroom door. "We're done," she called out.

As I stood up (and tried to pull the skirt down to a modest height), I head my roomates' voices. "About time," Seamus muttered.

Harry said, "It sounded like you were murdering him in there."

"That's because Ron's a big baby."

"I am not!"

"What was all that yelling about pumpkins earlier?"

Ginny handed me a pair of shoes; at least, I assumed they were shoes, because they were foot-shaped, although I had been under the impression that shoes ought to be geometrically sound, as opposed to, say, having one end propped up on stilts. They also hurt like hell when I put them on. "Where'd you get these from?"

"Parvati Patil. Hermione used an Engorgement Charm so they'd fit."

"Lovely." I wobbled towards the bathroom door, but stopped just out of the sight of the beds. "I'm coming out now."

Seamus started to say something, but I heard a loud crash that sounded suspiciously like a Charms book flung at high speeds. I took a deep breath and wobbled out into the room, ignoring Hermione's self-satisfied smirking. Harry, Seamus and Dean were all seated on Dean's bed, surrounded by textbooks and scrolls. They looked up at me, and three jaws dropped. Seamus' eyes got as big around as saucers.

I asked, "What?"

Seamus looked at the ceiling. Dean stuffed his face in a book. Harry began to furiously polish his glasses on the edge of his sleeve.

"What, do I look that bad?"

Seamus coughed loudly. Harry said, "Er...no...well..." Without putting his glasses back on, he reached over and pulled open Seamus' wardrobe so I could look in the mirror mounted inside the door.

Staring back at me was a drop-dead gorgeous woman with legs that went on forever and a killer figure. I wobbled forward; so did she. I touched my face, and it still felt like my face, mostly, except for a film of powder and paint. I was still clearly me, and yet...not. Definately not. At least with the Polyjuice Potion there had been no lurking resemblance like this, and anyway, I'd been lumpy trollish Crabbe, not this...whoever this was. I realized, suddenly, that if I were to meet myself on the street right now, I would go for me. "That's it, I give up, this is the most fundamentally disturbing thing I've ever done."

"It's not _that_ bad," Hermione said peevishly. "It's just a little make-up."

"We've done loads worse that dress in drag, Ron," Harry added.

I shook my head. "No. No, this is worse. I don't think it would be more upsetting to me if you broke my leg, tossed me in the Chamber of Secrets, and made me play chess with a giant spider while Fleur Delacour watched. This is _fucking weird._"

Ginny made a face. "Quit being melodramatic. Now, do you want to be late and have this all be for nothing?"

"Oh, god, no."

"They get your cloak on, it's time."


	3. Misbehavior

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's all Malfoy's fault and Ron gets his revenge; this means war.

It was hot backstage, unbearably hot, or perhaps it was just a side effect of slamming down butterbeer as fast as I could get hold of it. Justin Finch-Fletchly was looking at me out of the corner of his eye every once in a while as though I was going to hit him; I stared straight ahead and tried not to acknowledge his existence. This was partly his fault, after all. Seamus signed me up for this because he think I'm a fag, because I got caught with Justin in Greenhouse Two, because Malfoy...

A boy in a frothy wedding dress who had been singing about virgins came off stage, grinning; for a moment I glimpsed blonde hair glowing in the footlights. Malfoy. It was his fault most of all: his fault for doing that damn little dance, for making me think that way, for making me wonder...and then, for ignoring it, going on as if nothing had happened. Maybe I could've dealt with it rationally if he'd said something, even something insulting, or even started acting differently; but he didn't do anything at all. That was probably the most maddening thing of all. Hence, Justin, and hence, Seamus, and hence, I was sitting behind a curtain in the cellar of the Three Broomsticks, waiting for my turn in a drag show.

I do _not_ know how these things happen to me sometimes.

Pritchard and Baddock, a pair of Slytherins, quit picking at each other's natty wigs and went on stage next. I surreptitiously tried to adjust the Iron Maiden I wore under my dress, which Hermione insisted was actually some kind of brassiere. She and Ginny had conspired on my "costume," and Lavender Brown had put together my "act," such as it was. My roommates had compelled me to go along with them. Dean had said, "Come on, Weasley, one of us had to enter."

Seamus had said. "It's about upholding the honor of Gryffindor!"

"It's about," I had said, "my brothers offering you twenty Galleons a piece to get pictures."

Harry had flushed. "So, you, ah, saw that letter, did you?"

Either way I was still here, and it was much, much too hot. I itched all over, mostly due to my hair, which the girls had lengthened by magic until it fell nearly to my waist. This had to qualify as the most fundamentally disturbing thing I'd ever done, Polyjuice Potion included. I'd gotten a good look at myself in the mirror earlier, but there'd been nothing there I recognized; just a tall, attractive woman in an indecently short dress and the least geometrically sound shoes imaginable. When I had realized that I would go for me, or at least, for the woman in the mirror, I had resolved that the rest of the night was a lost cause. Nothing could be weirder than this. Oh, Seamus was going to pay…

Loud laughter could be heard from the house as Pritchard and Baddock performed. The loudest in my ears was Malfoy's. He was sitting right in front of the stage, just a few feet aware from where I would be standing; he would be looking right at me the whole damn time. Surely I would embarrass myself beyond all hope of recovery. I still had dreams about what happened last summermost were rather too sticky to qualify as nightmaresand it would just be too much, to know he was out there and watching me, knowing what we both had done.

Pritchard and Baddock came off, looking flustered. I was up next. My heart leapt into my throat as I stood up and wobbled towards the curtain in my geometrically unsound shoes. This was going to be awful, this was going to be a nightmare... _I shouldn't be so hung up about this. He was wearing more make-up and less clothes than I am now...not by much, granted...but still! I saw him vulnerable, embarrassed, it should make me feel better..._ Only he hadn't been vulnerable or embarrassed in the slightest. Somehow, the little shit had been completely confident and in control from the word go, and I was the only one embarrassed about anything. _But he didn't know you were watching him when he went up there, did he?_

Had he?

I paused halfway on stage. Had Malfoy known I was in the audience that night? I had spotted him beforehad he seen me? And had he danced anyway, knowing that I was out there, knowing what he was doing to me?

From the opposite side of the stage, Madame Rosmerta beckoned me out impatiently. I went out, but all of a sudden my shoes were no longer wobbly and I no longer itched. I felt incredibly calm. My purpose was now clear: I was not here to embarrass myself in front of half of Hogwarts, I was here to make Malfoy suffer. Preferably in much the same way he had made me, only a whole lot worse, and with an audience.

When the lights came up, I smiled out at the house while a few people whistled or gasped, but my eyes locked onto Malfoy's pale, pointed face. He seemed not to recognize me for a moment, but just as the music began, a look of complete shock began to creep across his features.

Lavender had arranged all of this; I had just done what she told me to, when she told me, and tried not to think about it too hard. A recording of her voice suddenly filled the room, I merely had to lip-synch along with it.   
_It's getting late  
and while I wait  
my poor heart aches on  
Why keep the brakes on?   
Let's misbehave_

This was easy; more than easy, this was _fun._ Malfoy was staring at me as though he'd just been struck with an oar, and the rest of the audience seemed to be enjoying it. I could just barely see Hermione, Ginny and my dorm mates gathered at a back table, laughing at me._ I'll give them something to laugh about...  
I feel quite sure  
une peu d'amore  
would be attractive  
while we're still active  
Let's misbehave_

I started to improvise my own choreography, much as I knew it would bug Lavender. I pausedon the edge of the stage, winking at a couple of fifth-year Ravenclaws, and watched them turn three shades of magenta. This was weird, definitely weird...but not bad. They weren't really seeing me, anyway, they were seeing that woman from the mirror. She wasn't nervous or awkward or anything less that confident, why should I be?  
_You know my hearts is true  
and you say you  
for me careSomeone is sure to tell  
but what the hell  
do we care?_

Malfoy was still staring at me, apparently unable to process what he was seeing. Crabbe and Goyle, ever present, appeared about as concerned as they ever did. Pansy Parkinson was with them, too, and she was watching him critically. I gave him an exaggerated wink; he flushed, then scowled; Pansy narrowed her eyes. Draco turned to whisper something to Crabbe, apparently dead set on ignoring me. _Oh, no you don't.  
They say that spring  
Means just one thing  
To little lovebirds  
We're not above birds  
Let's misbehave_

I made my way down off the stageit was only a few feet up anywayand into the audience. An enchanted spotlight followed me out.   
_We're all alone,   
No chaperone  
Can get our number  
The world's in slumber   
Let's misbehave_

I made my way, in a roundabout fashion, to Malfoy's table. He twisted around in his seat to watch me, and a look of horror slowly dawned on his face. _That's right, you little bastard, it's your turn...how do you like being the prey this time?  
There's something wild  
About you, child  
That's so contagious  
Let's be outrageous  
Let's misbehave_

I stopped right in front of him and pulled him to his feet by the front of his robes. Pansy, Crabbe, Goyle and a few other Slytherins watched, dumbfounded, as he actually stood for me. My geometrically unsound shoes had at least four-inch heels, and he didn't have those come-fuck-me boots this time; the top of his head wouldn't quite touch my chin. I let one finger trail down his chest, slowly, pressing hard, and managed to actually make his breathing hitch.  
_When Adam won Eve's hand  
he wouldn't stand  
for teasin'_

I leaned in, and took his face in my other hand, tilting it up towards mine. He looked uncertain, off-center, and evenyesjust a little afraid. Not at all calm or in control. I'd gotten to him, finally, after six years of trying, and in a way that nobody could miss. I leaned even closer.  
_He didn't care about  
those apples out  
of season_

For the briefest moment, I pressed my lips over his. Before he could react, before the people the back probably even realized what I was doing, I shoved him away with the hand still pressed flat against his chest. To my extreme disappointment, he managed to land in his chair and stay there; but the damage was done, in the form of my dark red lipstick all over his mouth. Pansy looked absolutely furious. I strutted triumphantly back onto the stage in time for the last line.   
_They say that bears  
have love affairs  
and even camels  
Are really mammals  
Let's misbehaveLet's misbehave_

I didn't much care about the applause, or the whistling, or the catcalls or the jeering as the lights went down. All I cared about was Malfoy glaring at me like it was going out of style, and covering his mouth with a napkin. Not wiping; just covering. I smirked at him; he scowled. I had a feeling that this meant war.

Justin was the next one out on stage; I went into the changing rooms Madame Rosmerta had provided and starting removing my costume. Hermione had promised to undo all the charms and put me right before I went to bed, but I wanted out of the Iron Maiden as quickly as possible. My brain was humming with adrenaline while I changed. I had gotten Malfoy back, gotten him back in spades, even if I had been dressed as a woman while I was doing it. I hadn't been flustered, or nervous, or anything. I hoped, irrationally, that he had a hard-on in front of everybody.

I was getting the last few buttons on my shirt when Ginny, Hermione and Harry stormed in. "What was that?" Ginny demanded, looking outraged. "What did you do that for?"

"Do what?" I asked breezily.

"Snog Malfoy in front of half the school," Harry said irately.

I rolled my eyes. "Oh, come off it, I wasn't snogging him. Just...having him on a bit." I smirked again. "Call it payback."

Hermione grabbed my hair from behind and started trimming it back to its original length with her wand. "Whatever. And here you were the one complaining about people talking, after what happened with Justin..."

"If they're going to call me a fag anyway, I might as well get to enjoy myself," I said.

Harry wrinkled his nose. "You _enjoyed_ that?"

"_You_ didn't see the look on his face afterwards."

Ginny made a face, but pulled a washrag and a bottle of potion from her pocket. "Here. So you can wash your make-up off. Oh" She tapped my hands with her wand, and my fingernails returned to their original length as the enamel vanished. "There. Wash up and everything will be back to normal."

"Except my legs are shaved and I'm going to have marks under my arms for weeks from the Iron Maiden."

"It's a _bra..._"

I sneaked upstairs once Hermione was finished and ducked into the men's room. I had just managed to get my face clean when Justin came in, stuffing his wig into his robes pocket. He jumped when he saw me at the sink. "Er...hello, Ron."

"Hello, Justin," I said. I hadn't been on speaking terms with his for the past week, but I was still high off my little triumph and feeling unusually charitable.

He looked immensely relieved not to be shouted at, and started talking very fast. "Look, Ron, I just wanted to say, I'm sorry about what happen, it was my fault for suggesting the greenhouse. I should've known that Professor Sprout would come in, and I never meant for the whole school to find out, and I understand why you haven't been talking to me but I just wanted to apologize, because I don't want any hard feelings, though I understand if you don't want to forgive me because it's your reputation that's been hit the hardest. Will you accept my apology?"

I wiped my face one last time and considered him. He still had on some make-up, nothing nearly as heavy as what I'd been wearing, and I could see a pair of Mary Janes poking out from the hem of his robes. His curly hair stuck out in all directions, and he was looking at me so earnestly that I was reminded of some sort of small dopey spaniel, albeit one wearing mascara.

If they were going to call me a fag anyway...

I smiled and put my hand on his shoulder. "'Course I will. Water under the bridge." He looked intensely, almost pathetically relieved. "You want to grab a drink before we go back to school?"

Justin raised his eyebrows; I think he caught my meaning. "Sure, I could go for a butterbeer..."

"Good," I said, thinking of that tortured look on Malfoy's face, "because I feel like orange juice."


	4. Zugzwang

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ron is late and nobody does the assignment

There's a tapestry on the wall just outside Professor Fix's classroom with a horrid flower pattern on it, but if you pull it away from the wall there's a little alcove with just the proper dimensions for snogging. That's where Lisa dragged me one minute before the start-of-period bell.

It's a mixed blessing to have a girlfriend that's as tall as you, something I was still in the process of discovering at that stage of the game. Lisa had her arms wrapped around my neck and was kissing me enthusiastically before I even realized where we were headed. After what I deemed a healthy interval (being a sixteen-year-old boy and all) I squirmed out of her range and tugged at her hands. "Turpin, you're going to make me late..."

She snorted. "You've got Muggle Studies, Weasley, that's right next door." She swooped in for another kill; I ducked.

"All right, you're going to make yourself late. I know for a fact _you _have Alchemy next" She cut me off with another kiss, and it took a lot of self-control to wiggle out of that one. "Damn it, I thought you Ravenclaws _liked_ school..."

"Doesn't mean we can't like boys better," she said, but she flipped back the tapestry and ducked out. Some fourth-years giggled as we emerged, but I shot them a death glare and they scattered. "Besides, it's been nearly a week since we had some time alone together. I'm feeling deprived."

"So go jump Harry in the halls, it's his fault I got that detention." Which was not, technically, a lie; like I told Professor McGonagall, I was provoked.

Lisa giggled and tossed her hair over her shoulders; it was brown and curly, not like Hermione's is curly, but like a piece of ribbon is curly. "He's not nearly so much fun, though. And anyway, he's _short._"

"Not his fault."

The bell rang, and I swore. She grabbed me and got in one last peck on the lips before tearing off for the dungeons, and I bolted the last few yards to Fix's room. I managed to get into my seat before the bell stopped.

Professor Fix is not, let me say, a bad teacher. He can't help it if the sixth- and seventh-year Muggle Studies course is the sort of class that people only take if they need another course for their N.E.W.T.s and don't want to actually think. (Or, in my case, if your Muggle-born girlfriend guilts you into taking it and you can't swap out after you break up with her.) I'm sure that he's really an excellent teacher, but the fact remains, though, that this was senior Muggle Studies, and nobody ever paid the slightest bit of attention if they could help it.

Which was remarkably easy to do, when he wasn't even in the room.

A few moments after I sat down, some sort of silvery thing ricocheted through the door, swerved around the room, and hit the chalkboard; the chalk rose up and began to write it Professor Fix's infamous curvy script: _Had to take student to hospital wing for duct tape accident. Will be back shortly. Continue in _Romeo and Juliet_ and take notes. _Everyone groaned; Fix's obsession with Muggle literature bordered on maddening, although I secretly didn't mind some of the stuff we read...not that I'd admit it where Hermione might overhear.

Still, we now had a free period, since no one in their right mind was actually going to complete the assignment except for Mandy Brocklehurst, who sits in the front row and only ever talks to argue with Fix. I turned around and scanned the room: of the students who hadn't skipped, three girls had immediately claimed a table in the corner and were reading _Teen Witch,_ one was Mandy, two were exes (Justin and Blaise Zabini, although the latter had been a one-night stand in the Quidditch cupboard) and one...was staring at me.

"See something you like, Malfoy?" I called to him. I noticed Justin giving me a dirty look before going into the corner to bother the magazine girls.

He just smiled. "Just wondering if you're quite as...skilled as I've heard." Ever since the drag show on Halloween, we'd been treating each other with a sort of guarded indifference; this wasn't the first time I'd caught him staring, usually with an intense and almost hungry expression that disappeared the moment I looked at him. I couldn't really quantify what I felt for him now; simple enmity does not involve erotic dreams or aggressive flirtation. But, then again, it didn't really matter, seeing as I had Lisa now. Right?

I leaned back in my chair and tried to match his expression. "Just wondering? Why not find out?" He raised his eyebrows, and without speaking, produced a chessboard out of his bag and began to set it up. "You carry that around for your health, do you?"

"I like to be prepared," he said idly, and started setting up the white pieces in front of himself. He gave me a look of open challenge, just a flick of his eyes from behind his hair, and, well, I had no choice but to take him up on it

"So, Malfoy, are as bad at chess as you are at Quidditch?" I stood and started crossing the classroom towards him.

He looked up innocently. "I could ask you the same question."

"At least Gryffindor doesn't have to cheat to win." I pulled a chair up to the other side of his desk, in front of the black pieces. "Fancy a match?"

He smiled again, lazy and slightly...triumphant? "I'm all yours."

I dropped into the chair, straddling the back. "Your move, then."

He played aggressive chess, not surprisingly, although he didn't stick to any opening that I was familiar with. I played it safe with a king's pawn move. The pieces were really quite nice-lookingas if you'd expect anything less, with a Malfoyand didn't say a word about our strategies. When it looked like he was about to fianchetto his black bishop, I asked, "Are you sure about that?"

He smiled, showing off his teeth. I wondered if vampirism ran in his family. "Quite."

I prepared for a fianchetto of my own, and suddenly found myself staring at his white bishop, poised to capture my own. I glanced at his face again; he was _smirking_ at me, the bastard. He thought he was _clever._ I drew back my bishop and scowled at him.

Malfoy had girl hands, I realized, as I watched him contemplate his moves. Dainty, slender hands, with elongated palms and bony fingers. His nails were the longest I'd ever seen on a boy. He traced one pointed fingertip along the edge of the board, then tapped the same one against his lower lip. His eyes remained glued on the board, apparently lost in thought, but as I watched the tip of his tongue darted out and circled the pad of that errant finger. _What must that taste like?_ I thought, without warning. Dust, maybe, or ink...or whatever it is that Filch used to clean the desks. I had never actually tasted a Hogwarts desk before, although that was not for lack of effort on the part of the twins. _Or maybe he tastes like lemons..._

"Your move."

"Hmm?" That flirtatious fingertip traced deliberately across his lips before he tapped it in the edge of the boad. Damn it, he'd caught me staring at him.

He smiled, again showing teeth. "It's your move."

I looked down at the board, and quickly advanced a bishop to complete the finachetto. Normally I have a good chess face, I don't know what it was about Malfoy that had me giving away so much. It's not like I actually like the git or anything. He attacked my queen with his other bishop and I blocked him, hoping to inspire a quick exchange. Instead, he pressured me, forcing me to make an odd, closed knight-move to relieve the pin. And then he retreated, apparently giving up a tempo and returning back to the starting square.

I tapped my foot idly against the leg of the desk, analyzing possible moves in my head. I'm good at that sort of thing when Malfoy's not distracting me. My position was too closed...I need to make room for my pieces to maneuver. I'd also managed to leave an open diagonal for his white bishop, something I should have been smart enough to avoid. I hesitated over my queenside knight, wondering if I could put a little pressure on him

and then all thoughts having the slightest thing to do with chess left my mind as I felt Malfoy's foot sliding up my leg. When had he removed his shoes? I locked eyes with him, but he looked bored and innocent, a few strands of pale hair hanging in his eyes. Underneath the desk, I could feel his foot, tracing the outline of my calf muscles through my trousers and heading up. I very quickly moved the first piece that came to hand, which happened to be a bishop. He immediately pinned it against my king, at the same moment he began to knead the inside of my thigh with his toes. I made the first move that came into my head, castling kingside, and tried to bat him away before I ended up with a hard-on in the middle of class.

He moved his bishop and smiled. "Check."

I pushed his foot down and tried to concentrate, refusing to be defeated before a single capture had been made. He merely began his ascent anew. I tried to kick him, but because of the way I was sitting I couldn't do more than glance a blow off his shin. I couldn't capture his bishop...if I tried to block it with a piece, we would just end up trading material...and (as I pushed his goddamn foot off me _again_) I refused to back my king into a corner from which there was no escape. _There is a reason,_ I thought darkly as he started up for the third time, _that sex and chess don't mix._

In a burst of inspiration, I blocked him with a pawn, then stomped on his foot for good measure. His face turned very pink and his eyes bugged out, and he exhaled forcefully through his nose. "Your move," I said cheefully, leaning back to savor the tears of pain forming in his eyes. He glowered at me and looked back at the board, quickly moving his queen to defend his bishop. He placed it down on the board so forcefully that it turned around and made a rude gesture at him, which he completely ignored in favor of glaring at me.

I moved a knight after a little hesitation; I needed to create a more open position. He merely pinned my other knight against my rook. Little bastard. I moved a bishop, and then, just because I felt like being annoying, I said, "You know, it's really no wonder that Parkinson left you."

He moved a pawn and stared at me. "Why's that, Weasley?"

"The cow's put on so much weight in the past year, she'd squash you during sex," I said. "Your move."

"At least I kept her for more than three days," he said haughtily as he moved a knight."What about you? What's's it been, three different lovers in four weeks? I've heard of sowing your wild oats, you know, but that's getting silly."

"Four, actually, " I said, determined to out-cool him. "But at least I know they're not with me for my wallet."

"No, they're probably the ones paying you, aren't they?" He smiled insolently.

I glared at him. "Shut up, Malfoy."

"Of course, I can't imagine you charge much, seeing as you'll apparently shag anything that's breathing and able." He moved his rook over to pin a pawn. "Boys, girls...I've heard rumors about the giant squid..."

"Go to hell." Actually, the closest I'd gotten to...well, _intercourse_ had been with Zabini, which, for myriad reasons, didn't count. But that didn't mean I was still a virgin or anything. Not that I'd explain all that to Malfoy, mind you...

He planted his queen on the queen's six square and batted his eyelashes. "You're the one who brought it up, Weasley. I'm just trying to keep up my end of the conversation.

I focused on the chessboard, trying to shut Malfoy out entirely. I could see what he was planning with his queen, but I couldn't think of any way to actually stop him that didn't involve a sacrifice. Figuring the tactic had worked well once before, I reached out to move a pawn and block the appropriate diagonal. He quickly reached out at the same moment, and one of those dainty, girly hands brushed slowly over my big squarish one. I glared at him; he merely smiled and said, "_J'adoube,_" before adjusting a pawn in its square.

I made my move and glared at him. "You're a bastard, you know that? A complete and utter prat. D'you just get off on annoying people or what?"

He smiled and reached out, leaning very far over the chess board until he was nearly in my face; I could only lean back so far without toppling over. "Why?" he aske. "Do you get off on being annoyed?" With great drama, he captured one of my key defending pawns, and plucked the stunned figure off the board by himself.

I fought down the little tickles that were crawling up my spine and stared at the board. There were no moves left to make...not unless I intended to sacrifice a whole hell of a lot of pieces for relatively small gains. There was no way I was going to sacrifice anything to Malfoy, though. So what choice did I have...?

A sudden scramble in the corner of the Magazine Girls was the only warning we had before Professor Fix appeared. He frowned at the relative disorder in the room as he wiped his nose with a hankerchief. "I thought I gave you an assignment," he said, sounding slightly annoyed.

"We finished it, Professor," Zabini piped up. The Magazine Girls nodded enthusiastically.

Fix looked doubtful, but nodded. "All right, then...back to your seats. Let's read this out loud, starts at the beginning of Act Three. Mr. Finch-Fletchly, if you'd read Romeo...Mr. Weasley, Mercutio...Miss Brocklehurst, I trust you don't mind reading Benvolio? Right...ah, Mr. Malfoy, let's have you read Tybalt..."

I went back to my desk and made a hopeful face at Mandy, because I'd forgotten my text. She sighed but moved to a desk next to me and spread her book out between us. The next half-hour was one of the most boring in my life, because, while I'm pretty sure there was a sword fight going on in the bit we were reading, nobody except Fix and Mandy understood enough to follow it. But I got to insult Malfoy...okay, my character insulted Malfoy's character...but it sort of made up for having to watch his eyes flash at me from across the room with that knowing little smirk. All in all, it was a big relief when the bell rang for lunch, and I ran out of the room as fast I could.

As I sat down at lunch, though, my eyes strayed to the Ravenclaw table. Lisa was chattering away rapidly with Padma Patil and that Chinese girl whose name I always forget. As I watched, Blaise Zabini came up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder; they started whispering, and I could have sworn they looked straight at me. Then Harry started bugging me about Quidditch practice, and when next I looked up, Blaise was gone and Lisa was scowling unpleasantly. _What on earth did Zabini tell her to piss her off? Surely not _that,_ it was a week before we even started going out...okay, five days...still..._

When Lisa got up, I excused myself and tried to catch up with her in the entrance hall. "Lisa! Wait up!" She slowed down a pace, but her posture was oddly rigid, and she had a funny little frown on her face I'd never seen before. I tried to put my arm around her, but she dodged me. "Er...say, I've got a free evening tonight, you want to, er, talk a walk or something?" She was acting mental and it was putting me off.

She tilted her head and looked away from me. "I don't think that'd be a very good idea, Ron."

_Okay, did she or did she not gripe in the corridor about missing me? _"What? Why?"

"I just...maybe we shouldn't be seeing each other anymore." She finally looked at me, and I realized what that funny little frown mean; she was _angry_ with me, not just miffed or annoyed. What the hell?

"What the hell?" I looked around and dropped my voice. "Is this about what Zabini told you? Because I can explain that, honest, there were extenuating circumstances"

_"Weasley." _She put up her hand. "Just...just stop, all right? I don't want to hear it. Please, just leave me alone now."

"But what did I _do?_" I asked, bewildered.

She shook her head. "You really are thick, you know that?" she said acidly, and then took off up the stairs. I tried to follow her, but she ran ahead, which left me standing in the middle of the entrance hall yelling her name like a prat. Great.

"Ron?" I turned around to find Harry and Hermione coming up behind me. "What happened?"

"Lisa just dumped me," I said, raking my fingers through my hair.

Hermione looked aghast. "Oh, _Ron_," she said, "what have you done now?"

_"I _didn't do anything!"

"That what you said when Justin"

"But this time I _mean _it!" I shook my head. "Blaise Zabini told her something during lunch, and just now she said she doesn't want to see me anymore and she won't tell me why!"

Harry shook his head in a sympathetic sort of way. Hermione just frowned. "What's Zabini got to do with anything?"

"Er..." _Oh, shit, Weasley, you never told them about the Quidditch cupboard..._ "We have Muggle Studies together."

"What's that got to do with Lisa, though?" Harry asked.

That's when it clicked. Zabini must've seen me playing chess with Malfoy in Muggle Studies. And Malfoy coming on to me. And then told Lisa about it... "I'm going to kill them both," I said quietly, the whole thing coming together in my head in a grotesquely elegant sort of way.

"Who? Lisa and Zabini?"

I shook my head. "Never mind. Just...never mind, okay? Let's just get to class."

_Malfoy, you bastard..._

I don't know how these things happen to me sometimes.


	5. Greatest (Interlude II)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hearts heal; souls don't.

I didn't exactly intend to fall for Ron. Point of fact, I wasn't planning on falling for anyone for a good long while; fifty years sounded about right. My last lover was a bastard, and no, I'm not going to tell you all about itjust that he was older and a different house and I never want to see him again. The exact details don't matter, anyway.

Besides, I reckoned I knew Ron, or at least had him figured out. Between casual observation and Lisa Turpin's week-long lecture series on Why Weasley is an Utter Ass, I'd pegged him as just another would-be Lothario too convinced of his own appeal, and I didn't need another one of those. I couldn't figure out why people like Lisa, who are normally fairly rational creatures, seemed to fall inand outof love with him again and again. Whatever had happened to him over the summer holidays hadn't changed his appearance, after all, just his attitude.

I discovered it when we were partnered in Astronomy, just after the Great Lisa Disaster. See, it doesn't have anything to do with his appearance or his attitude, or his little comments that are either sarcastic or flirtatious but you can't tell which; it's not nearly that obvious. Nobody will ever mistake Ron for a genius, but when he looks at you...I mean, really _looks_ at you...well, imagine standing center stage in a crowded theater, or in the middle of the Quidditch World Cup stadium. Distill all that down to one person. That's what it's like. When Ron is concentrating on you, it feels like you're the center of his universe. And he's _not _arrogant; to be honest, he always seems a little surprised to get a genuine compliment. And he's affectionate and sweet and gentle, and even in a bad mood he seems more alive than any other four people put together. Can you tell I was a bit smitten? Maybe I still am. But, honestly, when I was with Ron I felt..._lighter_, somehow. It's really no wonder people lose their hearts to him like that.

Keep in mind, however, that was when I was _with_ him. I mean, physically present. Two or three classes out of the week, including Astronomy, in which you can get away with quite a bit, provided you've a big enough cloak; parts of the weekend, except when he had Quidditch practice; some evenings; most mealtimes. (I got used to sitting at the Gryffindor table. Lisa still threatened to kick up a scene when Ron got anywhere near her.) When we were apart...It's not like I'm a jealous person. I didn't have him followed or anything. But it's a bit hard to ignore Megan Jones when she comes running into Greenhouse Five screaming _Did you hear what Ron Weasley did to Tracey Davis in Transfiguration?_ See, unless it's got broomsticks or a checkered board, Ron's attention span is roughly equivalent to a flobberworm's. When you're with him, you're the center of his universe, but when you're not...I should've remembered he was a flirt. I shouldn't have set myself up for this.

It wasn't just the flirting that got to me, of course. If it were that we could've done something. I could've ignored it. But when you spend enough time with someone you get to know their expressions, and Ron's just one of those people whose feelings come boiling out of him. When he's worried about Harry Potter, he gets a little crease between his eyebrows. When his sister's in the room he's either frowning or rolling his eyes. He's got a whole different sort of eye roll for Granger when she's babbling, and for some reason he flinches when he sees Blaise Zabini. He's got a face for every person, Ron does. Watch him sometime, maybe you'll see it. The more I noticed all these faces he made...maybe I'm crazy, you know. Maybe I'm seeing things. But, well, Draco MalfoyRon hates him. Or he's supposed to hate him. All the Gryffindors do, just like all the Slytherins hate Harry Potter. But when Ron looks at Draco, he doesn't look hateful. He looks...okay, a little bit hateful. But also angry. And maybe possessive. And maybe...well,_ something,_ anyway. All sorts of things, it's like there's too much to fit inside him properly. I've rarely caught Malfoy looking back, and when I do I can't read his face very well, but Ron looks at him an awful lot. And it seems like, when he walks into a room, the first thing Ron does is look around to see if Malfoy's there. I've watched him do it. I'm sure of it, I think.

But they still act like they hate each other. Except when they don't. Like, I caught them talking in the hallway once, and they were whispering to each other, and it was so _intense. _Lightening should've been coming out of their eyes or something. But when they saw me Malfoy stopped and said something about me being a filthy halfblood and Ron being my bitch, and Ron told him to shut the fuck up, and he left.

"What is it with you two?" I asked him a few days later when were curled up together under the Quidditch stands.

"Who two?"

"You and Draco Malfoy."

He went all rigid when I said the name, and he looked away. "I hate him."

"You just seem...odd, around him, is all."

"I hate him." He sort of snarled it. I couldn't see his face, but his voice was just so _full_ again, like he was feeling something bigger than he could hold. "You have no idea how much I hate him."

You don't stare at someone you hate. But I didn't say that.

So, yeah. When I wasn't around, Ron flirted. And did a more than flirt. And when I found out we'd fight, or at least, he'd try to fight. I don't yell and holler; arguments make me tired. Whereas Ron's method of dealing with any issue is to hit it over the head, drag it out into the open, and prod it repeatedly with a pointy stick until it's resolved. (If I understood that, I suppose I'd be a Gryffindor.) So he'd flirt and we'd fight and it would turn into a long slow-boiling mess, until I inevitably tried to smooth things over by apologizing. Or sometimes he'd beat me to it, and then he was just as gentle and sweet as always, and he'd promise everything but the moon. And in a few days he'd do it again. For a whole month we kept this up, and nobody else in the world seemed to notice a thing. Hell, Hermione Granger even mentioned to me on the side how glad she was that Ron had finally found somebody steady. I just sort of smiled at her and didn't say anything.

And all this really fell in on itself just before the Christmas holiday. I went to meet him after his Muggle Studies class, and I heard him talking to Malfoytalking in that voice that's so full of everything, saying those things that are partly sarcastic and partly flirtatious, acting like Malfoy was the center of his universe. I peeked around the edge of the door, and they were standing less than two feet apart, and there should've been lightening between them. I looked at Ron, at his rage and more-than-rage, and I looked at Malfoy, and something sort of clicked. Because Malfoy was relaxed, and Malfoy was razor-sharp, and Ron was the center of his universe. I kept on walking that day, off to lunch, and I didn't see Ron until late that evening.

"Mike?" (He knows I hate to be called that. He thinks it's cute to annoy me.)

"Yeah, Ron?" I stopped in the corridor and leaned against the wall. He sat on a windowsill, and between the moonlight and the intermittent torches he was really quite striking. Oh, not stunningly handsome or anything, no; but the contrasting lights did strange things to his hair and smoothed out the planes of his face until he looked androgynous. His eyes just looked impossible. I mean, there's blue, and then there's blue, and then there's _blue_, like the Muggle Christmas lights that hurt your eyes to look at.

He licked his lips and glanced at his feet. "Look, I'm sorry. I know I screwed up _again_, and, well...it's inexcusable." Which it wasn't, but he respected me enough not to shift the blame, which was heartening. "I don't know how these things happen to me, you know? I just...I'm sorry, Michael. I never mean to hurt you."

"I know you don't." Because Ron couldn't lie to save to his soul.

He smiled at me, but it was sort of a nervous smile. "Michael, I...I want...damn. I love you, I want to prove it. I want...to be a better person. I want this to last, you know? You're amazing, and...I want to show you that I'm yours...completely. I want to...to give you...everything..."

I blinked at him. Was he asking? Was he offering? He looked so serious, then, I felt he was opening himself, somehow. I was the center of the universe and he was handing me his heart and soul. Did I dare, again? "Do you mean that?" I asked, and stepped away from the wall.

He nodded, and said quietly, "I want this."

I leaned in and kissed him, and he took my hands in his sweaty palms. He was vibrating like a harpstring, but he leaned in just the same. Never holds anything back, Ron. He's all or nothing. I pulled back a bit and looked in his impossible eyes. "Are you sure?"

He nodded and swallowed hard.

I urged him up and lead him towards the Ravenclaw dorms. I only stepped away to whisper the passwordMandy and Kevin would string me up by my toes if I let that outand peek into the common room, to make sure no one was watching. Then Ron pulled up the hood of his cloak and we rushed into the boys' dormitories, trying not to look suspicious. There's an empty dorm across from ours, and we have a sort of understanding with the fifth years: don't ask, don't tell. Lord only knows what the house-elves think. I hung my cloak on the door handle and then locked us both inside, and turned to look at Ron.

He was endearingly shy about the whole thing, even though we'd fooled around before. But there's a world of difference between a handjob and buggering, between pulling down trousers in the boy's bathrooms and laying naked in a bed. We just snogged for the longest time, until he pulled away and brushed my hair out of my face. "Let's do this," he said, and I had to laugh. He looked so nervous, but so determined, like he was going off to war.

I stood up and took off my clothes, moving as fast as I could. When I turned around, Ron was already naked, and sitting in an odd position on the bed, like he was trying to hide his arousal without being obvious about it. He sort of peeked at me from under his fringe, waiting for some kind of judgement. Moments like that are what make Ron _Ron,_ you know. He's bold and shy and insecure and attacks the world from every angle. It's why I love him.

(Yes, damn it, I still do. I think I'm doomed.)

So I climbed into the bed and we snogged some more, just to get Ron to calm down, and things...proceeded from there. I'm not going to tell you _everything,_ of course. That's not the point. But it was everything I'd anticipated, and he kept shouting my name, and when it was over he clung to me and gasped and shook.

I shifted off of him and brushed his hair back. I think I'm obsessed with his hair. I asked, "Did you enjoy that?" when I was sure he was able to respond.

He said, "I didn't know my arse could _do _that."

I laughed and hugged him tightly. "I love you so much." And I meant it. Because just then, there was no Malfoy. I was the center of his universe and he was beautiful next to me, I was light and anything was possible. He had given this to me because he loved me. Everything else, we could work out. Right now, he was mine.

(Shortly after that we did it all over again. I'm a romantic, not a forty-year-old.)

Morning found us spooned up in the same bed, and when he woke up we snogged some more, and then I enlisted Kevin's help in smuggling Ron out of the dormitory without incurring the Wrath of Mandy. She's a terror about sex in the dormitories; Lisa insists it's because she doesn't get any. I walked to Gryffindor with Ron and waited just around the bend in the corridor for him to change clothes, and we went to breakfast together. I even held his hand in the corridors. I could see whole possible futures expanding outwards, because we could work everything out, and anything was possible. I was the center of his universe; he could be the center of mine.

I watched his face when we stepped into the Great Hall, though. Maybe I was just being paranoid, maybe I'd just had a premonition. I watched him, and watched his eyes sweep across three tables to land on Slytherin's, watched them settle ever-so-briefly on one platinum-blond head. Then he looked away and smiled at me and broke my heart.

I knew how to read his face pretty well by then, see. And I finally knew what was in the _something_ he felt when he saw Malfoy. He'd tried to give me his heart and soul, and I could love thatbut you can't give something away twice. The futures all shuddered and went dark, and when he smiled at me, I had to force myself to smile back. He didn't know. That made it all the harder, worse. He believed he loved me, and maybe he sort of did. But he didn't understand and that make things so much worse.

I ate breakfast with him that one last time, and he must not've noticed anything, because during our free period when I told him it was over, he lost it. He lost control and broke my heart all over again. I do love him, you know, but I know where I stand now. I won't do that again. A broken heart's better than a bruised soul, because a heart can heal and a soul can't. I've been there, I know. I didn't want to do that him. I figure it's all for the best, ultimately, because it would hurt us both more to keep up the pretense, no matter how hard he believed in it. It was better to break it off cleanly. I really believe that. I do.

So now I'm a Ron Ex, Lisa will speak to me again, and I don't have anyone to curl up with in the library in wet weather. (Not that Ron was a particularly good library partner...he often got, er, distracted.) Justin Finch-Fletchly asked me after dinner today if I wanted to trade Ron stories with him; I said no. I don't want to think about that right now. But then he mentioned he was staying over Christmas, and I suppose that caught my attention. He's not bad, Justin; greenhouse incident notwithstanding, he's gentle and honest. Maybe we can talk later, about something that isn't a Ron; maybe I could take a chance again. Later, though, But someday. After all, souls don't heal, but hearts can.


	6. Volition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry's head is about to explode, Seamus doesn't have a plan, and something is wrong with the universe.

**1 / Permission**

I didn't notice Hermione until she spoke. "Ron?"

"You're not supposed to be up here," I told her, and continued to rummage through my trunk in search of something to wear that was not too small, torn, or maroon.

"Ron, do you really think this is a good idea?"

I considered a Canons shirt for a minute before tossing it aside. "Who told you, Harry or Neville?"

"Dean, actually." She sat down on the edge of Neville's bed and watched me. "And since when do you actually care about your appearance?"

"Since I decided to seek out a meaningless one-night stand with a total stranger."

"What about Michael?"

"Michael can rot in hell."

"You didn't break up, did you?"

"Very perceptive, Miss Granger, five points to Gryffindor." I tossed aside a year-old Weasley jumper and kept digging.

"Oh, Ron..." She knelt next to me and tried to hug me. "What happened? I thought you were doing so well together..."

"So did I," I said. Actually, I'd figured out a while ago that he was losing interest, but I'd been so sick of Hermione's lectures by that point that I'd actually made an effort to keep the relationship going. Shows how smart I am.

She sat on her heels. "That still doesn't explain why you want to sneak into Hogsmeade."

I found a faded blue sweater that I'd swiped from Bill and tugged it over my head. "We want to sneak into Hogsmeade to get terrifyingly drunk."

"Ron!"

"What?" I jumped to my feet the same time she did and did my best to loom at her. "Look, Harry's been tying himself in knots for the past week over Sirius, if he doesn't start to relax soon, his head will explode!"

"So you're going to get him drunk?" she asked. Great, she'd gone all Little Miss Temperance on me.

I grabbed my comb and tried to fix my hair. "Wemeaning all of us, Dean includedare going to take him for a night out. We are going to distract him. Merlin help us, we're going to make him have fun or die trying, and, yes, drinking will figure in the equation."

"How is getting Harry drunk supposed to help him have fun?"

"It'll make him relax for a while."

"And what about tomorrow, when he's sober?" she asked.

I sighed and leaned my forehead against the mirror. "Hermione, I'd much rather forget about tomorrow for the moment, all right? Tomorrow Harry will be sober and probably depressed again, and Michael will be at breakfast, and I'll have to write a letter home and explain myself to my mum, and I will actually have to think. Right now, I'm going to sneak into Hogsmeade and enjoy myself, which means _not_ thinking, to the best of my ability. Okay?"

She came up behind me and put her hand on my shoulder. "What do you mean, explain yourself to your mother?"

"She found out, okay?" I pulled away from her and turned around. "Somehow she and Dad heard something and they want to know what's going on."

"You didn't tell them?"

Oh, joy, another Hermione lecture. "What am I supposed to say? 'Dear Mum and Dad, I'm queer, love Ron?' They'd disown me."

"They would not!"

"You don't know my parents."

"I know" She snapped her mouth shut and growled, then hugged me tightly. For a moment there I'd thought she was going to bite. "Take care of Harry, all right? And don't drink _too_ much."

"Are you saying you approve"

"No. Now get going, before I come to my senses."

I impulsively hugged her back. "Thanks. Don't wait up." Before she could lecture any more, I snagged my cloak and bolted down the stairs.

**2 / Proposition**

I should've known things weren't going to go as planned after that, but we sallied forth nevertheless. After all, we were all Gryffindors, weren't we? And Gryffindors aren't afraid of anything, except women's underwear and, in certain situations, ordering anything stronger than butterbeer.

"I thought the idea was to get drunk," I hissed to Seamus right when the smirky little waiter at the Hog's Head brought over the third round.

He gave me an evil look. "Did you see those bouncers? What if they ask to see our Apparation licenses or something?"

As if we weren't suspicious enough in our black Hogwarts cloaks. "You suggested we come here, I thought you had a plan!"

He kicked me under the table and I turned away, frustrated and sober. Damned Irishmen. Harry and Dean were talking about yesterday's Quidditch game, and Neville was mostly looking about and trembling. I groaned and buried my face in my arms. _Bloody great idea this was, eh?_

All of a sudden there was a moment of almost absolute silence, and then everyone started talking again, louder than before. I looked around. Two witches with black hair and short robes were walking through the pub, flirting with the customers and laughing. "Who are _they?"_ Seamus asked, interest instantly piqued by anything with breasts.

Neville and Harry had to turn around in their seats to get a look; Neville swung right back forward wearing look of sheer horror. (How could someone _be_ that virginal?) "I guess they work here," Harry said, looking a bit more pink in the face than normal.

Dean's eyebrows shot up and his eyes bugged out. "No wonder this place is so popular, then."

"Or maybe it's the five-Sickle beer," I said, and stopped paying much attention to the conversation. Those girls looked familiar.

They spent quite a bit of time at a table halfway across the room, then came straight towards us. Neville turned around again, and went very red, then pale, then red again; it was like watching a barber poll. Seamus immediately tried to comb his hair back with his fingers, and Harry got that pie-eyed look he normally reserves for Cho Chang. The slightly taller one stepped between Harry and Neville and leaned forward, bracing her hands on the table. This allowed Seamus, Dean and I to look down her robes, but she either didn't notice or didn't care. "Good evening, gentlemen," she said in a sort of deep, seductive voice. "Are you enjoying yourselves?"

Nobody else seemed capable of speech, so I said, "Immensely." I would've said it sarcastically, except I was pretty sure Seamus lacked the brain function to recognize sarcasm by then, and my voice sort of cracked in the middle of it. Yep, we could just see right down her robes, couldn't we?

The second one laughed and leaned over too, though not as far. She put one hand on Harry's chair, which seemed to make him the happiest boy alive, and the other on Neville's, which seemed to paralyze him. This had her draped bodily over her friend, but neither of them seemed to mind. "Tell us," the second one said, "would any of you be interested in a little proposition?"

"What sort of a proposition?" Seamus blurted. I snorted at him; for all his obsession with sex, I knew for a fact he'd never even gotten into a girl's bra, silly Catholic boy that he is.

The first witch put on a look of fake innocence the like of which I hadn't seen since the last time Fred and George blew a hole in a wall. "Oh, nothing much...but if you oblige us, we'll buy you drinks for the rest of the night."

"We know the bartender," the other one said, and winked.

Dean regained his composure long enough to ask, "What is it you want us to do?"

The first one dropped her voice to a mock-whisper. "We want to see one of you kiss another boy."

Four pairs of bulging eyes turned to look at me.

_Of course,_ I thought,_ let the token queer handle it._ Never worry, never fear, Ron the Wonder Fag is here. Although…it would net us free drinks, and might even further my quest for an emotionally void one-night stand. It appeared that it was once again up to me to take one for the good of Gryffindor. "Some boy in particular, or will any one do?"

The second witch peeled herself off her friend and went to the table across the room. I had just enough time to register that everyone sitting there wore a black school cloak before she grabbed someone by the shoulder and pulled him up. Platinum hair shimmering gold, Draco Malfoy climbed to his feet and let her guide him over to our table. _That_ was different, then; that changed _everything._ I jumped up and strode over to meet them, feeling the sweet old hate coursing through my veins with every step.

Malfoy looked surprised for a second when he saw me, but that surprise turned to arrogance and…was that possibly anticipation? The lights were so low and flickery it was hard to tell. I stopped when he was just a step away, but he kept moving until we were toe to toe, as close as we could get without actually touching. "That desperate for a handout, Weasley?" he asked under his breath.

"This desperate for some action, Malfoy?" I said, and glanced sideways at the two witches. They were standing arm-in-arm about a foot away, and the taller one nodded with an indecent little smile. I had barely looked back to Malfoy before he jumped upwards, wrapped his arms around my neck, and pulled me down into a kiss. I grabbed his head from behind to hold him in place and leaned into it.

He shoved his tongue in my mouth, probing and questioning; I shoved right back, and our teeth scraped together. We were pushing against each other with enough force to bruise, and he pulled at my hair as he sank his fingers into it; but his mouth did in fact taste like lemons and I could feel his heart pounding against my chest and his racing pulse through his lips. I could smell the overpriced cologne he wore and the sweat underneath it, and his hair was soft under my hands. It was pleasure and pain and force and demanding and sweet like cinammon candy; he fought with me like his life was at stake, and I didn't back off for a moment. Wouldn't give him that satisfaction. Our teeth banged together again, I tasted somebody's blood, and he gave up a little, voiceless moan.

Eventually, we both had to stop and breath.

I straightened up, which broke his loose hold on the back of my head, though he pulled out some hair before dropping his arms. His face was flushed and his eyes hooded, and he licked blood off his lower lip before swaggering back to his table. The two witches in short robes applauded before going of towards the bar, and I dropped back into my seat to catch my breath.

Neville had covered his eyes with his hands, and Seamus and Dean were sitting perpendicular to the table and talking about football. Harry just shook his head at me. "I hope that was worth it," he muttered, swirling the butterbeer in his mug.

I smiled and punched him in the shoulder. "Lighten up, Harry, it's only Malfoy. Besides, we get free drinks out of it."

He frowned. "Ron, your mouth...

I blinked at him, then touched my tingling lips. My fingertips came away stained blood-red; Malfoy's blood had smeared all over me. I wiped it off with a napkin and smiled at him again. "Not mine. 'Salright."

Harry shook his head and went back to his butterbeer.

That little waiter came back, no longer so smirky. "What will you gentlemen be having?" he asked, as if he resented our presence.

I smiled at him, too. "Do you serve screwdrivers?"

**3 / Submission**

I love the snow. It's like a scab out of heaven, covering everything and protecting it and concealing it. It doesn't matter what's underneath, see, whether it's good or bad or indifferent, because snow makes everything soft and cold and perfect.

"Oi, Ron, come on...the road's this way, mate."

I love the snow.

Dean grabbed me by one elbow and pulled me in another direction. "I love the snow," I told him, smiling at the swirls of white stained gold by the lamps.

He shook his head. "You drank too much."

"Did not."

"Fine, you didn't."

He tapped Harry on the shoulder; Harry and Neville were leaning on each other and seemed need the help walking. "Found him. Where'd Seamus go?"

"Seamus?" Harry blinked. "I just saw him..."

"He is wise," I announced, "and, on my life, hath stol'n him home to bed."

Harry and Dean both stared at me. "What did you just say?"

I laughed at them, they looked so confused. They were from Muggle families, didn't they know? "Seamus," I explained. "The ape is dead, and I must conjure him."

Harry frowned, sending his glasses askew. "Did he just call Seamus an ape?"

But now that I remembered the speech, I took off running through the gold-stained snow. Take _that,_ Fix. "Seamus! Madman! Passion! Lover! I conjour thee by Lavender's bright eyes, by her fine foot, straight leg, and quivering thigh, and the, the wossnames that there adjacent lie"

I could've kept going, honestly, but Dean had to go and tackle me, offending the snow. "Ron, shut up, we're going to get caught!"

I squirmed and tried to throw him off; for a skinny guy, Dean is strong, and I couldn't get any traction in the soft snow. It occurred to me just how we were positioned, and I giggled. "Honestly, Dean, you could've just asked..."

"What are you...? Oh, hell, Weasley! Stick some of this snow in your pants, why don't you?" He stood up, unfortunately, and tried to pull me to me feet. I wobbled, and landed on my ass. "Ron!"

"What?" I tried to stand up by myself and fell again. "God, Dean, you didn't have to hit me so hard..."

He was about to launch into tiradeyou get to know these things, after a while, with Deanbut then I thought I heard Seamus hollering, and Dean said a word I hadn't thought he even knew. "Ron," he said desperately, "stay right there. I'm going to go get Seamus, and then I'll come back and get you. Okay?"

"Sure." I huddled in the snow and did my best to look pathetic. "Just leave me here, all alone in the cold, I'll be just fine all by myself..."

"Good." He sprinted off, yelling Seamus' name.

Well, _fine._

I managed, with complex machinations, to get to my feet. All around me, the buildings kept jumping in and out of the snow. I shivered and tried to remember which way was the road back to Hogwarts. I'd just come from that way, hadn't I? But then why were footprints leading _that_ way? And where was Gladrags, I thought we'd just passed it...which set of footprints were mine?

"Oh, Weasley...?"

I turned away from contemplating the swiftly vanishing tracks. Malfoy was standing on the other side of the street (at least, I guessed it was a street, and I presumed that was the other side of it) and _he_ didn't seem cold at all. Or terribly drunk, at that. "What do you want?" I shouted.

He seemed to be smiling, but with all that blowing snow I couldn't tell. "I think the question is, what do you want?"

"Good king of cats, nothing but one of your nine lives."

"What?"

See, _I _pay attention sometimes in Muggle Studies. "I asked you first."

He lifted his chin, all arrogance and conceit. "I want to know whether you're interested in finishing what you started back there, in the pub."

Now, if that wasn't a proposition, I'd never heard one before in my life. And if I'd been a bit more sober, or a bit less annoyed with Dean, or if I'd still been with Michael, I'd have ignored him. As it was, I crossed the street. "What did you have in mind?"

Instead of telling me, like a normal person, he ran. I had to chase him.

Even though I was drunk, I could still run faster, as long as I was sure I was headed the right way. He stayed just within my line of sight, a black and white figure looking larger than life as his cloak blew in the wind. He seemed to be jumping in and out of the snow like the buildings, never far enough to lose, never close enough to catch. Then just like that, he disappeared, and if I hadn't needed half a block to stop running I would've missed the place where his tracks bent into an alleyway and up a set of wooden stairs. I looked up just in time to see the door of an attic room close. At first I was relieved he wasn't planning to just go at it in the snow, whatever form 'it' would take; then I realized that the fact he was planning at all didn't bode well for me. After all, he was sober.

I climbed the stairs, opened the door, and stepped into the attic room. Malfoy was ready for me. He seized me by the front of my cloak, trying to throw me to the floor. The door, apparently uninterested, swung shut by itself. By some miracle I kept my feet, and we staggered around the room like very bad dancers before he managed to pin me against a wall. He started to kiss me; I seized his hair and leaned into it, refusing to submit. It was heaven for thirty-six seconds before he stuck his hand in my pants.

Michael had fucked me; I'd let him fuck me. I'd had some vague notion that it might save what we passed off as a relationship. That particular idea had lasted about as long as it took for him make sure nobody had seen us leave the Ravenclaw dorms together, and I wasn't out looking for a repeat performance. Whatever Malfoy wanted to do, I vowed, he'd do it on _my_ terms. I shoved him away from me, and all he succeeded in doing was dragging me down on top of himself. For a few moments our bodies were aligned, and I felt his erection pressing into my own. Then he squirted out of my grip like so much wet soap, and yanked my t-shirt and sweater both over my head in the process. My arms ended up snarled in my own clothes, and by the time I got them free (by taking the shirts off) Malfoy had gotten across the room, putting between us a big, hideous brass bed with moldy sheets.

"Nice view, Weasley," he said, brushing the hair out of his face as his eyes swept over my bare chest. He was staring so hard I could nearly feel it.

"Shut up and get over here," I snapped at him.

He smirked. "Come and get me."

Merlin knows I tried.

I vaulted right onto the bed, intending to go up and over, but he tackled me halfway. We landed on the mattress in a heap. He tried to squirm away again, but I got a handful of his shirt and tugged him back, ripping off half the buttons in the process. We tussled like that for a while, until I finally got him underneath me again and held him by the wrists. He smirked like a madman and kissed me again, and I didn't even notice he was slowly stretching both our arms upwards until my knuckles hit the tacky brass bedposts. And I still didn't think anything of it, until he started to flex his body against mine and I started to groan, and suddenly I didn't have his wrists anymore, he had mine. Or something did, anyway. Just that fast he was gone again, slithering out of my reach.

I stared at the headboard, trying to work out what had happened. A huge, hideous metal bracelet had closed over either of my wrists, and a metal chain wound through the ornamental bits of brass connected them. I lifted my body and jerked them uselessly; there was no way I'd be able to get out of this short of removing an arm. I twisted my head around, and found Malfoy staring at me in smug triumph, all mussed hair and hickeys and torn-up shirt. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" I demanded...well, more like yelped. Not that I was panicking, mind you.

"You like those?" He gestured to the bracelet affair, practically caressing the steel before trailing fingers across my arm. I shivered. "They're call hand coughs."

"Where the hell did you get them?"

He smirked. "Virgil Moon." (Moon is a well-known mental pervert. There's something about the way he smiles.)

I wriggled closer to the headboard, so I could look at this contraption closer. The wrestling match had burned through some of my screwdriver-induced fog, and I was aware that being half-naked and chained to a bed and alone with Draco Malfoy fell into a small, special catergory of Very Bad Things I had heretofore never encountered. This was not a public spectacle or a crowded classroom; there was no danger of someone walking in on us. There was a distinct possibility that I was in trouble, and I hoped he wasn't planning on simply killing me.

The mattress squeaked; he had climbed onto the bed behind me. I twisted around creatively, and was stunned to see he was stark raving nude. He saw me looking and smirked. "See something you like?"

I groaned and dropped my body, burying my face in the pillows. I simply do not know how these sorts of things happen to me. The next thing I felt was Malfoy's body stretched out over mine, and his lips on the side of my necksucking, touching, tasting. I turned my head to ask again what the hell he was playing at, but he started kissing me, and I couldn't have protested for all the tea in China. He shifted around, resting most of his weight on top of me, and started running one hand over my chest. It felt...well, _nice, _damn it. Something was wrong with the universe.

I gasped when he tweaked one of my nipples, and he went back to nuzzling my neck and shoulder. "Malfoy, what are you doing?" I asked again.

He trailed the tip of his tongue across my collarbone, the looked up with a perfectly amused smirk. "I thought that was rather obvious myself." He then slid his hand lower, over my stomach, and started fumbling with my pants fly.

No. That was it. He may have me tied up and I may be horny and he may be offering, but he was not going to...to...to _whatever_ me, no matter how "nice" it felt. I started squirming and thrashing, trying to throw him off me; he just caught me in a bear hug, dead weight forcing me down, and dug those long girly nails into my skin. "If you'd prefer, I'll leave right now," he hissed in my ear. "I'm sure you can free yourself eventually."

"Go to hell," I growled back...but I stopped moving.

He kissed me behind the ear, then slid backwards and straddled my legs; with some difficulty, he got my fly open and dragged my jeans down. I had some vague notion of just letting it happen, trying to ignore it, playing the dead arse so he'd get bored and let me go. That was before he started touching me through my boxers. Now thatthat was better than just _nice._ My knees went all shaky, and I pressed my face into the musty pillows, and my hips, totally on their own, started to grind into his grip. When he let go to pull off the rest of my clothes, I nearly groaned out loud.

Suddenly I was chained to a bed, alone with Draco Malfoy and naked, and I was not only not doing anything about it, I was encouraging him. He stretched out over me again, and started kissing and licking up the other side of my neck; his free hand went back to what it had been doing, and my world narrowed down to three points of sensation where his body met mine. Everything else could, and did, disappear.

He pulled away, and I couldn't do much more than sink down to the mattress and gasp for air. He reached onto the floor for something, and then he whispered the spell that brought me back to full attention: _"Lubricus." _

Something cold and slippery started oozing across my ass, and I started in alarm. "Malfoy..." But what the hell was I going to say? _Please don't fuck me, I've had a bad experience with that already?_ _Let's not and say we did?_ "...er..." _Oops, sorry, look at the time, must dash..._

He traced his fingers down my spine and made a shushing noise. "Just relax." That was all the warning I got before he stuck the first finger in. It hurt, while he stretched and prodded; but that pain was just another kind of pleasure, and I could live with it. Then, all too soon, he put his knees between mine and his and hands on my hips and _pushed,_ and that was definitely painful in a hundred thousand ways. What little of me could think rationally knew it was the result of too little lube and too little stretching, all too fast. I felt a yell rising in my throat, but, damn it, I wasn't going to give him even that much; I clenched my jaw and buried my face in the pillow. It ended up a low sort of keening sound, and Malfoy froze. I shifted around and tried to make it hurt less, without much effect.

He started to rub his hands down my flanks, and planted little kisses on my back, and made those shushing noises again. After a few moments he reached around and started to stroke me again. Pain, pleasure, pain; I shuddered and welcomed them both, and time start to blur out of proportion. I hadn't even realized Malfoy was moving again until he slid all the way in and kissed my neck, and when he started to thrust I found myself moving in time. I could hear him breathing through his nose, harshly, and making small noises that never got past his teeth. Now and then he would nuzzle my neck again, and his free hand lay against my chest. (I was supporting both of us, braced on my elbows.) Pleasure, pain, pleasure; it felt too good to continue and it hurt too much to stop.

He bit into my shoulder when he came, hard enough to break the skin. We both collapsed and lay there in our own mess. The first thing I was able to think coherently was _oh, fuck._ After a few minutes, Malfoy pushed himself up, stretched, and then, very deliberately, licked the blood off my skin before getting up and dressing again. I felt him kiss me one last time, on the cheek, then heard his wand tap against the steel hand coughs. They fell away, Malfoy left, and I rolled over to wait for circulation to return to my hands.

**4 / Omission **

 The Gryffindor common room was empty when I finally got back, still blushing from the Fat Lady's pointed, painted look. I climbed the stairs slowly, jumping the squeaky ones and trying not to move too suddenly. I reckoned I'd be sore for a while.

It was a relief to see four beds with their curtains shut and lamps extinguished, even if I did nearly break my neck on Neville's shoes. I lit my wand, as dimly as I could, then stripped to the waist to inspect the damage. Both my wrists were bruised darkly from the hand coughs, and in a few places, rubbed raw; I had other scrapes and bruises here and there from the wrestling match beforehand. He'd left a big hicky on either side of my neck, the mark on my shoulder, and four shallow, parallel scratches across my chest, right over my heart. If I wore long-sleeved shirts with high collars for a few days, and maybe changed clothes in the bathrooms, nobody would ever notice. I was just thankful he hadn't done anything to my face...

...wait a second.

I opened my wardrobe and peered into the mirror on the door. There was a bloody mark across my cheek, a parody of lipstick. I furiously scrubbed it away with my discarded shirt. Fucking Malfoy. Fucking Malfoy and his fucking games and his fucking kisses and his fucking mouth

"Ron?"

I jumped and looked around. Harry, still half-asleep, had stuck his head out of the curtains around his bed and was blinking at me. I panicked until I noticed he wasn't wearing his glasses; his vision was perfect with them on, but without, he couldn't see anything clearly more than five or six feet away. I extinguished my wand, just to be safe. "Yeah, Harry, I'm back."

"Where'd you get off to? We looked all over Hogsmeade."

"I got lost."

"I figured." I sat down on the edge of my bed to take my shoes offsat down too quickly, and hissed in pain. "Ron? You okay?"

"I'm fine."

"You sounded like you were hurt."

I shut my eyes and swallowed hard. "Peeves knocked me over on a staircase. I landed on my tailbone."

"Ouch. Do you need to see Madame Pomfrey?"

"I'm fine."

"Okay." He yawned hugely. "Good night, Ron."

"Good night, Harry."


	7. Meaning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry huffs, Ron sings, Draco runs, and the hedgehog can never be buggered at all.

"Oi, Ron?"

I looked up over the edge of my _Quidditch Quarterly_, to where Dean and Seamus were ostensibly doing their Charms homework on Seamus' bed. "What do you want, Finnegan?" I asked.

Seamus propped himself up on his elbows and stuck his quill behind his ear. "Is kissing a bloke any different from kissing a girl?"

I considered the question. Excluding Hermione, (because she's, well, _Hermione,_) I'd kissed four or five girls, and about as many boys, all told. There wasn't a lot of, you know, categorical difference, unless you included things like lip gloss and breasts. It was like I'd told Harry after Great Justin Distaster in the greenhousespeople are people, and their bits don't really matter as much as everyone says they do. Beauty is beauty, mouths are mouths. It doesn't really matter so much _what_ you're kissing as _who_...

...like when Malfoy grabbed my hair with his pointy girl hands and bit my lip and _pushed,_ when it was sweet like cinnamon candy and painful pleasure both, when I didn't back down and he didn't give in, when my hands were in his hair and his arms were around my neck and he was leaving bloody kisses on my face, he was on top of me and we were moving and it hurt too much to stop...

"Er, Ron?"

I blinked. Seamus and Dean were staring at me. "Eh?"

"Is it?"

I forced a smirk on my face and winked. "Well, if you're so curious, I could show you first-hand..."

Seamus turned a bit green, and a moment later Dean announced they were going to study in the common room. I went back to my magazine, or tried to, but Harry got to me first. "That was uncalled for," he said.

Now, of all the unpleasant things that have ever happened to me, the worst ever was probably Malfoy. The second worst was nearly being eaten by a giant spider, and but tied for third (with Sirius sort of kidnapping me and breaking my leg) would have to be fighting with Harry. Any time I've fought with Harry, I mean. The boy just doesn't know how to do it _properly;_ he just gets all quiet and sharp and avoids you. If he'd yell or something, that I could deal with, but not quiet. And when he said, "That was uncalled for," he said it all quietly, and it was all I could do not to say _Oh, great, not again._

I actually said, "What was, Harry?"

"Ron, don't play stupid with me."

"I was just having him on."

"You deliberately made him uncomfortable."

I sighed. "Look, Harry, it's none of their business and Seamus deserved what he got."

"He was just asking a question."

"He was being an ass!"

"Why are you so touchy lately?"

"I'm not touchy!"

He scowled at me and pushed his glasses up his nose. Usually that was another a sign you should head for the hills. Not having that much sense, I pretended to be reading my magazine. "Ron, ever since the holidays you've been acting strange. Everyone's noticed it, even Ginny. You've been trying to get into anyone's pants who will even look at you, you're about as discerning as a cat in heat, I don't know what happened to you."

Damn it, I _was_ going to be more interested in the newest broom polish than in him. "My sex life is none of your business."

"You're my best friend, Ron, of course it is!" He was standing up now. Abandon all hope, ye who entered here. "All this fooling around, this...this _promiscuity,_ it's not healthy. It isn't like you!"

"And how would you know what I'm like anymore, Harry?" In retrospect, there are probably stupider things I could have said, such as _Your father was a three-toed sloth_ or _Shut up, you whinging speccy midget._ There were not, however, very many. And the absolute worst thing to have done at that point was carry on, which, naturally, I did. "You spend all your free time moping around and moaning your fate and making googly eyes at my baby sister, and when you _do _come back to the real world you're either telling someone off or trying to borrow their homework. You're so wrapped up in _yourself_ I'm surprised you even remember I'm alive!"

Like I said, Harry doesn't know how to fight properly. If he did, he would've just popped me one and told me to go fuck myself with a broken wand, or something. Instead he just went all quiet again, grabbed his cloak, and practically ran downstairs. After a few minutes, it dawned on me what I'd said, and I buried my face in my magazine. I don't know how these sorts of thing happen to me. Of _course_ Harry's wrapped up in himself; he's got every right to be wrapped up in himself, considering, you know that he's being stalked by You-Know-Fucking-Who and all. How stupid could I _be?_

I rolled up my magazine, grabbed my cloak, and went downstairs. Hermione and Ginny were sitting by the fire, along with Neville, and I'd hex him if he got much closer to either of them. "Ron! What's the matter with Harry?"

"Me," I said, trying to fasten my own cloak while walking.

Neville frowned, Ginny scowled, and Hermione sighed. "Oh, Ron! What did you do now?"

"Long story," I said, resisting the impulse to smack her. "Did he mention where he was going or did he just storm out in a melodramatic huff?"

"Huff."

"You might try the broomshed," Ginny said. "He goes flying a lot, when he's upset."

Well, I _knew_ that; she shouldn't have, though. God, Harry and Ginny datingthere was a frightening thought. Though not as bad as Ginny and Neville. Or Hermione and Neville... "I'll try him there," I said, and headed through the portrait hole before I could take that line of thought any farther.

I checked a few other places first, like the Owlery or the library, before I went out to the pitchpartly in case Harry had decided to do something out of character, partly to let him cool off before we started arguing again. It seemed like all I ever did with anyone these days was argue. Argue with Harry about my sex life, argue with Hermione about my homework _and_ my sex life, argue with Ginny about what to tell Mum and Dad when they ask her about my sex life...

I was started to sense a theme, I really was.

Right. Well, I searched the castle and turned up no Harrys, so I headed outside; but I could see almost immediately that there were far too many figures zooming around the Quidditch pitch for Harry to be there. Probably a last-minute cram practice; Slytherin would play Hufflepuff the next day, and the winner would probably end up neck-and-neck with Gryffindor for the Cup. There were lights on in Hagrid's house, but I reckoned that'd be the last place I'd check. I didn't particularly want to knock on the door and say _Excuse me, Hagrid, but I said something disgustingly insensitive even for me when Harry rather diplomatically called me a slut, have you seen him around anywhere?_ Just thinking about sex and Hagrid at the same time took me to a very bad mental place anyway. So I walked all the way around the lake twice, checked for footprints near the Whomping Willow, and even peered discretely into some of the greenhouses. No Harry anywhere.

What was I going to say when I found him, anyway? _Sorry I was such an ass, Harry. I guess you're right? _No way. It's none of his business who I'm with or what we do together or how often. Just because he's saving himself for "Miss Right" doesn't mean I have toI'll take Miss Close, Miss Almost and Mister Near Enough, too. Preferably in large quantities. (I mean, I _am_ nearly seventeen.) It's not like I'm irresponsible about it, either. I know the same spells everyone else does, I use them. There aren't any wandpoint weddings or nasty rashes in my future. Sex doesn't mean anything, anyway; it's just sweat and mess and a good feeling for a few minutes, and when you're done, that's it. Put your clothes on and go. It's fun. Granted, waiting for Miss Right is a bit more romantic, but at least when I find her I'll know what to do with her. Or him, I guess. If she, or he, even really exists.

The curfew bell started to sound inside the castle. It was times like this that I really wished Dumbledore hadn't confiscated the Marauder's Map. I could've found Harry with a couple taps of my wand. Instead I was wandering around the grounds like a lunatic, freezing to death, and I was probably going to have to dodge Filch coming back because there was no way I was going to let Harry sit around and huff himself into a state. Even if he was wrong. Which he was. I started marching back towards Hagrid's house, because I reckoned I was now at the last resort stage of things, and if _he_ hadn't seen Harry I'd...well...just keep looking, I guess. Friendship is the pits sometimes, you know?

I had to go past the broomshed to get to Hagrid's. I could see that the Quidditch pitch was now empty, which was only logical, since whoever had been practicing would've needed time to pack up if they wanted to get back to their dormitories before curfew. There was still a light on in the shed, though, and I could see people standing around back of it. I didn't really think about it until I heard somebody yelling through the cold, still air.

"I said get the fuck off me!"

I would recognize that voice anywhere. I'll be a hundred and eighty years old, senile, bedridden and blind, and I'll still know that voice in a heartbeat. Malfoy, the smaller of the two cloaked figures, was pressed against the back wall of the broom shed and screaming at the top of his voice, and my first and only thought at the time was, _why isn't he screaming at me?_

My next one, several minutes after the fact, was, _just where the hell did _that_ come from?_

I kept walking forward, but carefully, because there was a crust of ice just under the snow and it crunched loudly when I stepped through it. The other figure with Malfoy said something I couldn't make out and moved closer to him, practically covering him; Malfoy yelled again, "Damn it, get _off_I'm not like you"

The second figure laughed and echoed him, mimicked him, emphasizing an undercurrent of fear mingled with anger. "Not like who, you little faggot?" he said, and I recognized the voiceAlex Bole, a seventh year Slytherin Beater notable mostly for being built like a Muggle lorry. "Little pillow-biting fairy."

"Shut the fuck _up,"_ Malfoy snarled. "I'm not queer!"

"The hell you aren't." I was now close enough to see fine detaildetail like Bole reaching up and running his thumb over Malfoy's lower lip. "Always were camp as a row of tents. No wonder Parkinson left you; caught you trying on her panties, didn't she?"

"Fuck"

Bole suddenly grabbed Malfoy's face, hard. "Don't lie to me, you little bitch. I know you're a filthy queerwe all dobet this is your dream come true." His other hand disappeared between their bodies, and Malfoy went rigid all over. "Like it when it hurts, don't you? Bet you always wished one of us would grab you like this and teach you something about _real_ men..."

I sort of went mad then. It wasn't like I felt anything for Malfoy. I hated him, I didn't care what happened to him. But ever since what happened in Hogsmeade, I'd been dreaming about him, just like this. I'd fantasized about catching him alone somewhere, vulnerablein an empty classroom, in the forest, even right here at the broomshedcatching him, and making him pay for what he did. Pinning him down and watching him spit and glare and scream at me, while I...well...did _something_ to him. The fantasies were a bit vague on the particulars, usually, but they always ended the same way. He was always moaning in the end. Moaning for _me._

And here was Bole, pinning him down and watching him spit and glare and scream, but it should've been _me,_ he screamed for _me._ _I _was the one he hated, he hurt, he was _mine _to pay back and pin down. It was my turn, my fantasy, my hands on his body and his breath in my ear. Not fucking Bole. Malfoy was _mine,_ damn it. Mine.

No, I wasn't exactly coherent. To hell with coherency. I raced up behind the side of the broomshed, heedless of the noise, drew my wand, and took a deep breath. My plan of attack wasn't quite properly Gryffindor, but it was better than getting my head bashed in, and it would definitely get Bole out of the picture.

I sang. __

"The hedgehog can never be buggered at all! Buggered at all! Buggered at all! The hedgehog can never be buggered at aaaalllllllImpedimentia! Stupefy!"

Bole never even realized I was there; I staggered him the moment he came around the corner and Stunned him before he could figure out what was happening. I reckoned Defense Against the Dark Arts had taught me something after allit was either that, or hanging around with Harry for five years. I kicked the big oaf in the ribs to be sure he was out, and when he didn't react, I pushed back the hood of my cloak. Take _that,_ you big filthy troll...

"Weasley, what the _fuck_...?"

Malfoy was standing less than three feet away, still leaning heavily against the wall. He was re-fastening his cloak and staring at me like I was a maniac. I felt a bit like a maniac, to tell the truthI didn't care about Malfoy, I hated him, and I had just attacked another student completely out of the blue for...well, not exactly no reason, because Bole was a disgusting pervert, but it was a pretty random thing to do. I could already hear Hermione lecturing me about trying to kill perverts after curfew, or something. Come to think of it, she'd probably manage to work in something about my sex life in there, too.

Malfoy, still fiddling with his cloak, swallowed hard and tried again. "Weasley...what the fuck are you doing?"

My only sudden burst of inspiration was to act casual. "Oh, I was, er, just in the area..." I shoved my hands in my pockets, and one of them closed around the eclectical plug Professor Fix had handed out to our Muggle Studies class a few days ago. It was obviously not going to be of much help in this situation. "...and, you know, I saw you about to be raped and all..."

"Shut up." Malfoy was _still_ trying to fasten his cloak; I suddenly realized his hands were shaking too badly to work the clasp. He sounded hoarse, probably from all the hollering. "Just _shut up._ This is all your fault."__

"What?" I stepped over Bole until Malfoy and I stood toe to toe. "How the hell is this _my_ fault?"

"You started all this," he said, and backed away.

I took another step forward. _"I_ didn't start anything, you daft git!"

Malfoy retreated again, until he was back flat against the wall. "Just keep the hell away from me, you fucking faggot!"

"Faggot? Look, _you're_ the one who fucked _me,_ you little" I stopped. I was standing in the same position Bole had been when I spotted them. Malfoy had finally gotten his cloak fastened, and was groping inside his Quidditch robes for his wand. His hands were still shaking, but he glared at me with such an acidic expression that I took a step back. Not because I was scared of himyou can't seriously be scared of _that_ little midget. I stepped back because, well, I was about to live one of my fantasies. Bole had been living the same fantasy. Bole was a pervert. What did that make me?

Malfoy got his wand out, and even with a two-fisted grip on it the tip traced little jagged patterns in the air. I took another step away, and he slid away from the wall, shuffling about to his left. Like a trapped rat, he looked. I was suddenly very uncomfortable. "Look, Malfoy...er..." _Change of subject, change of subject, change of subject... _"What to we do with him?" I kicked Bole again for emphasis

He stopped staring at me like a hunted animal and thought for a bit. "Crabbe can start as Beater tomorrow in his place."

If I'd ever doubted Malfoy was completely mentalyou know, as if what he'd done to me in Hogsmeade hadn't been enoughI had full proof right there. "So we just leave him like this?"

"No, Weasley, we leave him in the broomshed," he said, as if it were obvious. "If he dies of exposure, you'd be guilty of manslaughter, and then I could be charged as an accessory after the fact."

"As a what?"

He made a derisive noise and, after a few tries, levitated Bole around the side of the shed. I probably should've left right then, which would've made several things a whole lot easier and several other things a whole lot nonexistent. But I felt like there was something more that had to be said, something _incomplete_ about the whole thing. With Bole being sort of unconscious and things, this was the first time Malfoy and I had been alone together since that night in Hogsmeade (I'd been avoiding himwho wouldn't?) and if I wasn't going to jump him, I wanted to do at least something. So I followed him around the side to the door of the shed, and since I didn't really want to be thinking too hard about what I was doing, I took the plug out of my pocket and started fiddling with it. At least it was something to do with my hands.

Malfoy dumped Bole on the floor next to the crates of Quidditch balls, turned around to leave. He nearly jumped out of his skin when he realized I was still there. "What the hell are you doing, Weasley?" he demanded.

I concentrated on my plug. "Look, Malfoy...I need to talk to you."

"You are talking to me."

"I meanfuck."

"We have."__

Bastard. "And what the hell was it? I mean, _why?_"

He looked at me sideways, smirking a little. Guess he was getting over the shock. "Why what?"

"Why did you" I almost said _rape me._ But it wasn't rape, not really. If it had been rape (and this was as much a revelation to me as anyone just then) I wouldn't have liked it. I wouldn't have enjoyed it. I wouldn't have wanted more.

"Why'd you do it?"

"Why'd I do you, you mean?" He hesitated, as if he was waiting for me to try to kill him. While I really would have liked to, I reckoned that I'd never find out anything if I did, so I just clamped my fist around the plug and kept silent. "I suppose I just felt like it."

He was so fucking _casual _"That's it? You just woke up one morning and thought 'Hmmm, I'm gay, guess I'll go fuck Weasley?'"

"I'm not gay." Only he said sort of, sort of _brittle_-like, as if what he was saying was glass and it could shatter.

I snorted at him. "You're fucking deep in denial, then."__

"I'm not in denial!" I dropped the plug.

Bole groaned, and Malfoy took off practically at a run. I kept after him (though I made sure to shut the shed door, so Bole wouldn't see us). "Is that all?" I demanded. "Was everything just...just nothing? Just you fucking around because you felt like it?"

"Why is that so hard for you to grasp, Weasel?"

"Because I was there."

He stopped; I nearly ran into him. He turned on me and he was the angriest I'd ever seen him, face red, eyes blazing. He might've looked a bit more pissed if smoke had been coming out of his nostrils or something, but I'm not too sure. "Shut the fuck up, just shut up, you fucking imbecile! You're nothing to me, you get that? _Nothing._ You were nothing but a _hole_, a _whore,_ a _convenience_ for a quick shag and run. How devastatingly _stupid_ would you have to be to think that I would ever havehave _feelings_ for some_thing_ likelike" His voice broke, he made a funny sort of growling noise, and he took off running, kicking up little clouds of snow behind him with every step.

I couldn't move. I was shaking, I was so angry; I was seeing spots of gray and red around the edges of my eyes. I just kept thinking _How dare he, how dare he, how dare he..._The little _bastard,_ the fucking _git_...it wouldn't have been so bad if he'd actually cared about it. It would've been better if he were some kind of mad stalker or something. You just don't kiss like that if you don't really care...do you? Bastard. Fucking bastard. It couldn't have been worse if he'd paid me.

I dunno how long I stood there in the snow. It must've been a while because my feet were freezing and wet when I heard another set of footsteps behind me. For one horrible moment I thought Bole was coming to kill me; but when I turned around, it was just Harry coming from the direction of Hagrid's house. "Ron? What're you doing out here?"

I cleared my throat. "I was...er...looking for you. Originally." I scuffed the snow with my foot, hoping that he wouldn't look too closely at the patterns of footprints. "I got a little distracted."

"Oh."

We stood around in an uncomfortable silence for a while. Snow had melted into my gloves; I took them off. I realized I'd lost my plug somewhere, but I reckoned I could get Dad to send me one to replace ithe must have about five hundred. When I got so I couldn't stand it, I just blurted out, "I'm sorry about what I said, Harry."

He jumped a little and sort of smiled, and then said, "I'm sorry, too. I guess it really isn't any of my business."

I startled myself more than him when I said "No," but the more I stood there with snow in my shoes and thought about it, the more it made sense. I looked up, but it was too dark to see anything except glints of light off his glasses, so I couldn't really tell his expression. "No, I think...maybe...you were right. Sort of."

"Really?"

I nodded. "I think I'm going to lay off...things, you know. For a while."

"You really mean that?"

I nodded. "Sex doesn't mean anything, anyway."

He sighed. "That's...I'm glad, Ron. Really. I was worried about you."

"Yeah, well. You don't have to worry about me, I'll be all right." I started walking back towards the castle, and Harry matched pace with me. "I'll be fine. Just...never mind."

"Hmmm?"

"Never mind."


	8. Romance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Draco is disgusting, Ron is a hermit and an Evil Plan needs to be Stopped. Maybe.

"He's _doing_ it again."

"For heaven's sake, Ron, will you hush up?"

"That's the fifth time this week."

"Yes, Ron, I know. You've told me so repeatedly."

"It's disgusting."

"Then quit looking at it!"

Ha. As if I could. "Hermione, he's doing it in public! He couldn't get more attention if he were running around naked yelling 'Wahey!'"

She rolled her eyes and bit into her toast. "Have you ever considered trying to ignore him?"

"How?" I demanded. "How the hell am I supposed to ignore _that?"_

Malfoy was sitting at the Slytherin table, next to Ophelia Nott. Nott's one of those pretty girls who doesn't know she's pretty, like Hermionenot really my type, but there you are. She looks like she's been put through the wash a few too many times, sort of faded-like, with white-blonde hair and white skin and green eyes that, I swear to Merlin, have streaks of yellow in them. At that particular moment, she also looked royally pissed, because Malfoy was leaning in close to her and flirting as through his life depended on it. He buttered her toast for her. He topped off her orange juice.

"I'm going to be sick," I muttered.

Hermione shut the book she'd been reading and put it down on the table. "Ron, that's it. If you say another word about Malfoy, I'm going to go sit next to Neville."

"Don't tell me you actually _approve_Hermione? Hermione, where're you going? Hey!" I yelled at the back of her head, "I didn't know you were _serious!"_

I watched her sit next to Neville, who probably could've been struck by lightening without noticing; he was alternately glaring at Colin Creevey and staring at my sister, the pervert. Seamus was flirting with Lavender, Parvati was with some older boy, and Dean kept peering at the one Chinese girl over at the Ravenclaw table (you knowthe one who's not Cho Chang). Justin and Michael were talking near the Hufflepuff table. Blaise Zabini was perusing a large pink Valentine card that sang whenever it was opened. Harry finally showed up for breakfast and sat across from me, yawning.

"You're not in love, are you?" I asked him.

He blinked at me. "Hrrm?"

"Good." I concentrated on my sausages.

Because it's not like I needed somebody or anything. I was perfectly happy just the way I was. I'd been as chaste as a hermit for nearly a month and it was just so bloody wonderful I could scream. It was a miracle I didn't break into a song and dance routine, I was so happy. And Valentine's Day was a stupid idea anyway, because if you really love somebody you shouldn't need a holiday to tell them so, and you shouldn't rub it in the noses of the losers and the hermits who don't. And

"Ron, were you planning to eat that?"

I'd smashed my sausages into a thin paste all over the plate. And Malfoy was slicing Nott's for her. "Oh, to hell with it," I mumbled, and shoved my plate away.

Harry poured himself some orange juice and sighed. "What exactly is the problem now?"

"There isn't any problem."

"That's why Hermione's sitting over by Neville, then?"

"Hermione's in a bad mood this morning." Harry coughed. "Oh, don't you start, too."

"I didn't say anything."

Nott jumped to her feet and tried to leave; Malfoy cut her off, and I got the impression that he wanted to make Goyle carry her books for her. He was _pouting,_ for crying out loud. "That's obscene," I muttered.

"What is? Malfoy and Nott?" Harry actually _laughed_ at the whole sick display. "You'd think by now he'd have figured out she's not interested."

"He's an ass. He's a stupid ass. What the hell is he doing now?"

Somebody had knocked a goblet over, and there was a puddle of orange juice on the floor. Malfoy had actually knelt down and draped his cloak over the mess. Apparently he meant for Nott to walk on it. She said something that sent the entire table up in laughter and went around him, and he just sat on the floor and glared at her with his face all pink. Crabbe and Goyle were staring at each other helplessly; I couldn't really blame them.

"She treats him like so much flobberworm slime and he hasn't tried to kill her yet. He just comes back again and again for more. Has he lost he bloody _mind?"_

I didn't realize I'd spoken aloud until I noticed Harry giving me the Completely Baffled Look of Doom. He put his fork down and wiped his mouth with his napkin. "Well, yes, Ron. People tend to act like that when they're in love. And you have to admit she's an improvement over Parkinson, visually speaking..."

_But he's not in love!_

I have no idea why I was so certain. I had no idea why I cared. Malfoy was an evil-minded son of a bitch and I should have been gloating over how badly he was embarrassing himself. Instead I was sitting here fuming over every nauseatingly cute little overture he made, because...why? Because they were absurd, for one thing. And for another...there wasn't another, was there? Damn. But he absolutely could not be in love with Nott, not now, not in this world. Which meant he had another reason for ogling her and then smiling while she kicked him in the teeth. Which meant he was up to something. And I had a duty as someone who was, you know, not evil, and that duty was to stop people who are evil when they're up to something. Malfoy, being evil and up to something, needed stopping. It was perfectly logical when you thought about it _that_ way.

I finished my breakfast and went to class. Harry fell asleep during Flitwick's lecture while I finished my Transfiguration essay. I showed it to Hermione during our morning break, but she refused to check it for me. "You should've had it done last night, I had plenty of free time to look it over for you then." I stuck my tongue out at her behind her back.

Harry rummaged through his bag and started muttering to himself. "Er...neither of you have seen _my_ essay, have you?"

I shrugged. "You probably left it in our dormitory."

He said a couple of words that would've shocked my mum.

Hermione scowled at him. "Just run back to Gryffindor and get it, Harry. You've got plenty of time."

He checked his watch. "Are you sure?"

"I'm positive."

I nudged him with my elbow. "Want me to come with you?"

He shook his head. "No, no sense in both of us being late..."

"You won't be late!" I yelled, but he was already running back to Gryffindor Tower. Not like he meant to be rude, mind you, but his marks had been slipping, enough that even the teachers were worried. Personally, I thought he was entitled to it, things being as they were, but apparently Professor McGonagall didn't consider You-Know-Who a good reason not to hand your homework in on time. _I _thought she had her bun pulled a bit too tight, myself.

Hermione just shook her head while she watched Harry go, then turned the other direction down the hall. "Come on, Ron, let's get to class."

"Class? Hermione, we've got loads of time before class starts."

"I know _that,_ but I want to ask Professor McGonagall about those mollusk-to-monotreme transformations she mentioned last weekthe ones you and Harry were having so much trouble with?"

"What to what what?"

She gave me a _Look,_ which I supposed was meant to substitute for some kind of lecture about how I need to Apply Myself More to My Schoolwork. "I'll see you in class," she said tartly, and went off down the hall in the opposite direction that Harry had gone. And people wonder why we broke up at the end of fifth year.

Wait a minute. I was alone now, wasn't I?

"Great," I muttered. "Just bloody wonderful." The sappiest damn holiday of the year, and here I was, alone, abandoned by my friends and with no one to call my own. Not that I needed anyone to call my own. Or to call anything, for that matter. Or just anyone in general. I was celibate and I was alone and I was _happy_ about it, it was the best decision I'd ever _made,_ la di-dah di-dah di-dah...

Okay, I was bored.

I started to walk around without any real purpose; I'd heard something about Sir Cadogan's portrait getting moved into the trick stairwell by the library, and I had an idea to go bother him. It was something to do, anyway, and I'd likely catch Harry on his way to McGonagall's room. I took the shortcut past the DADA classroom and ended up heading down a corridor of empty classrooms, not really hurrying, even though the break was only a quarter-hour long. And, because Fate is an evil-minded asshole, I came around a corner and plowed directly into Malfoy, headed the other way.

"Watch where you're going," he snapped, but his voice sort of trailed off in the middle. I'd stopped avoiding him; I had no reason to avoid him. After all, it wasn't my fault he was a crazy evil bastard who got off on tying up helpless drunks and fucking them senseless. He'd started avoiding me, though, even to the point of skipping Muggle Studies on a regular basis. We hadn't said two words to one another in the last four weeks, and that had been just fine with me.

I said, "Watch it yourself, prick." He took a few steps backwards, as if he couldn't stand to be within three feet of me. I noticed he was carrying, of all things, a big white chrysanthemum with a silver-and-green ribbon tied around the middle. Goyle could've figured out who it was for. "Trying to bribe Nott with flowers now?"

He folded his arms across his chest, careful to avoid crushing the flower. "It isn't a _bribe,_ you idiot, it's a Valentine's gift. Not that you'd know much about gift-giving, course."

Bastard. Evil bastard. "Good thing it's not a rose, or you might lose an eye when she throws it back in your face."

"I gave her roses earlier," he announced, like I ought to be preparing an article for the _Prophet_ about it. "But one can never have too much romance in a relationship."

I snorted. "Oh, yeah, you're really the king of romance, aren't you?"

"Jealousy doesn't look good on you, Weasley."

_"What?"_ I yelped. Definitely crazy bastard. "You've got to be kidding me, Malfoy. Why would I be jealous of _you?"_

"Well, let's seeI'm rich, smart, handsome, popular _and_ well-bred, and, oh, yes, I've got a girlfriend."

Merlin's big hairy balls. I ought to have called St. Mungo's on the spot. "Oh, yeah, Malfoy. Real wonderful girlfriend, if she can barely stand to be in the same room as you."

"She's being coy," he said, looking sulky. "Besides, I haven't seen you in the company of either sex recently. Raised your prices, have you?"

I _tried_ to hit him, honestly, but it was a half-assed sort of swing and he dodged it anyway. "You shut your fucking mouth, Malfoy!"

He smirked. "Make me."

"I'm alone by my own choice!" And of course it sounded incredibly stupid when I said it to _him._

"A likely story. Has Pomfrey any idea when the rash will clear up?"

I slammed him against the wall. The chrysanthemum hit the floor. I hadn't exactly meant to do it, but, damn it, when he _looked_ at me like thatlike he _owned_ me or something...lucky for me he didn't see it coming either. When his back hit the wall, he _squeaked._ "Take. That. Back."

"Truth hurt, Weasel?"

"You should know."

"What the hell do you mean?"

Good question. Except, somehow, my brain and my mouth had lost touch, and the one was running along just fine without the other. "Bole, broomshead, this time last month? Ring a bell?"

His eyes flashed. Never seen eyes do that before, that's just how to describe themlike lightening. "Shut up."

"Well, wouldn't you find it a bit suspicious if the bloke who'd tied _you_ up and buggered you claimed not to be a faggot? I know I did..."

His face fell, and there was something wild and desperate underneath. "You don't know what the fuck you're talking about," he hissed, clutching at my hands.

"The hell I don't." We hadn't been this close since Hogsmeade. I could feel his heartbeat, smell that nasty cologne, see the sweat beading on his forehead as blood rushed into his face and....other places? _Either that's his wand, or he's nearly as big a pervert as I am… _

He was practically gasping for breath now. "Get off of me."

"Make me."

"Get _off!"_ He tried to shove me away, but I had a much better position, and this time around I was sober. I threw my weight against him, he started to thrash and struggle, and we both lost our balance and fell to the floor. He tried to slip away, but I seized his robe, flipped him on his back, and sat on him. And proceeded to discover that it was definitely _not_ a wand in his pocket. He looked like he was about to strangle me or cry. "Fuck you," he said softly.

_You already did._

He seemed so different from this anglehis hair sort of spread out, wild-like, his face flushed, and for all that he was spitting and glaring at me, his true feelings were poking me in the bum. He snarled at me, and I must've gone mad for a moment, because all I wanted in the world was those curling lips. I bent my head and kissed him. I could taste the sweat on his lips, some kind of mintmaybe mouthwash, maybe just toothpaste. I pressed against him, as close as I could get, holding his head in place with one hand and sliding the other up under him, across his back. Without thinking about it, I rocked my hips against his, and felt little electric shocks shoot through my body. And Mr. I'm-Not-Like-_That_ whimpered and pushed into the kiss and put his tongue in my mouth, like he was trying to get the right angle for sucking out my tonsils. It was fireworks and cinnamon all over again. You couldn't have paid me to stop.

I shifted my position a bit, and he seized hold of me by the hair like I was going to escape. I slid one of my knees between his legs, forcing his thighs apart, until my leg made contact with the bulge in his trousers. He gasped and rolled his hips forward. I pulled away just long enough to get a good look at him underneath me, and it was almost too much at once; his lips were swollen and wet, his eyes were glazed over, his whole body arched up to meet mine. _This_ was my old fantasy, this was revenge, this was wonderful, this was

"Ahem."

this was...eh?

"Excuse me."

Malfoy raised his head to look over my shoulder, _whimpered,_ and crawled away crab-wise. I rolled over and found myself looking right at Ophelia Nott. She glanced between the two of us, one eyebrow raised, mouth pursed in a puzzled little frown. Malfoy had gone dead white, and I just couldn't meet her eyes. I wish I knew how these things happen to me sometimes.

Nott finally look at the chrysanthemum. I think we'd been laying on it.

She cleared her throat and straightened up. "I haven't the slightest idea what's going on here, and I don't think I really want to know. It's not any of my business anyway." She glanced at me oddly before turning towards Malfoy. "But if you ever come near me again, I swear by Merlin that Moon won't kill you." She walked away briskly with her nose in the air. Malfoy stared after her incredulously. I looked down at my dusty, rumpled robes.

I hate silence. It ought to be outlawed.

"Er" The look he turned on me should've melted the door hinges. It's not like any of this was _my_ fault, though. Mostly. "What's she mean, he _won't _kill you?"

"He won't, but I'll wish he had." He climbed to his feet, brushing furiously at the streaks of dust on his robes, and kicked the remains of the flower away. Without another word, he stalked off after Nott, leaning forward so that his robes hung just _so_. Since all the blood in my body had collected in my face, I merely had to snatch up my discarded bag and get the hell out of there as fast as my legs could carry me.

Professor McGonagall gave me a bizarre look when I walked into class early, but she was nothing compared to Hermione. She looked me over from head to toe and her mouth dropped open. "Ron! What in heaven have you been up to?"

She didn't want me to answer that question.

I dropped into a seat and tried to smooth my hair back, or at least make it look sort-of-presentable. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. When she kept on staring at me, I could only shake my head. "I make a lousy hermit."


	9. Development (Interlude III)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The True Adventures of Colin Creevey (Esq.)

being_ The True Adventures of Colin Creevey, Esq._

So I was walking through the corridor, minding my own business, right? And all of a sudden these two older blokes built like cement trucks come around a corner and grab me, right out of the blue. I mean, they were _enormous_if you've ever seen American football, American Muggle football, well, sign this pair up to be line backers. They had no necks. Now, I am a peace-loving individual, but my dad did train me in the manly art of self-defence, and I felt I had a bit of an obligation to try and fight back. Didn't want to blacken the good name of Creevey or anything. So I kicked the one on my right very hard indeed in the kneecap, jammed my elbow into the ribs of the one on my left, and completely failed to break heroically free and run for my life. Can't say I didn't try, though, which I reckon keeps the good name un-blackened in the balance of things, right?

Okay, so these blokesthe half-troll linebacker blokesthey shove me into this empty classroom and turn me around. And there's this boy sitting at one of the desks with his feet up on it, smirking at me, and...well...it's not exactly hard to mistake Draco Malfoy for anyone else. He's this nasty Slytherin sixth year who like to be horrible to people who can't fight back, like my brother Dennis. Not that Dennis can't fight back, what with the manly art of the self defense and all, but he's even shorter than me, and you can't exactly defend yourself if you're being held off the ground by your collar.

I hate that kid. Malfoy, I mean, not Dennis. He probably amuses himself by killing puppies.

So Malfoy takes his feet off the desk and gives me a nasty look and says, "Hello, Creevey," and then he wrinkles his nose like I smell bad. Although, really, the linebacker twins had pretty bad B.O., so maybe he was making a face at them. I don't know, I'm just the kid the camera. I don't have a lot of experience being dragged into random classrooms by Slytherins; they tend to beat me up in the hallway if at all.

It occured to me then that I might just get beat up now, so I decided to take the whole thing like a man. I cross my arms and turn my chin up and say "What do you want, Malfoy?" the way Harry Potter would. That's what's so great about Harry, you know? He doesn't take shit from anybody, especially not poncy Slytherin puppy-killers like Malfoy. It's absolutely great. If Harry had been there, he'd probably have turned them all into fishsticks and thrown them out the window or something, just because he's Harry and he can do that sort of thing. As it was, I'm Colin, and I can't turn anything into fishsticks except fish, so, oh well.

But, right, Malfoy. So I say that to him and he scowls, and one of his thugs just smacks the back of my head so hard my face slams into the desk. That _hurts._ I mean, ow. I don't know how many people go around getting their heads smacked into solid objects, but it really, really, does not feel comfortable. And then the bugger holds me down like that, and Malfoy leans in right next to me ear and says, "You'd be smart to show me a little more respect, Mudblood," and then right-hand bastard lets me go. That's when I start to catch on that, uh-oh, these people are psychopaths, I just might not want to piss them off. Unless I can turn myself into Harry Potter and turn them into fishsticks, which isn't looking likely at all. And, you know, if they beat me up I might just lay here in this nasty classroom and bleed on things until Filch or a ghost finds me, if ever, and that would be really increadibly bad. So I stand up and nodded and twitch the end of my nose to make sure it's not broken. Not that I'd know what it feels like to have a broken nose. Can you feel that it's broken, or is it just sort of there? Maybe I should ask Dad...

Oh, yeah, Malfoy. Okay. So I stand up and he leans back in his chair and the sunlight coming through a windowpane sort of catches on himdramatic-like, you knowand I kind of wish for my camera. Only not really, 'cause a puppy-killing psychopath like him might break the lens. And he steeples his fingers, you know, that thing where people just touch their fingertips together but not their palms? And he says, "Listen carefully, Creevey, because I'm going to make you an offer you cannot refuse."

And I'm thinking, _Oh, my God, Malfoy has joined the Mafia._

"I want to..._borrow_ your camera for a while," he says, and he makes that nasty face again. I reckon it's because he thinks he's too high and mighty to borrow anything from me, and, you know, I don't exactly appreciate that from a fellow who kills puppies. "I also want you to develop some photographs for me. You are to have them done by the end of the month, and if you tell anyone about this deal, I will kill you."

Item one: it's twenty-fifth February. I don't exactly relish the idea of staying up all night developing pictures for a psychopath. Item Two: I love my camera. Like, personally. My roommates make fun of me for it, but, well, they don't have cameras like mine. I am not letting it into such dangerous hands. Item Three: People who calmly say that they're going to kill you will not take no for an answer.

This is all pretty distressing.

So I ask him, just to buy time, "Why don't I just take the pictures for you?" 'cause I'd sooner eat dirt than let him have my camera. He might violate it or something.

He makes this face like he's going to get pissed at me, but then he smirks again and says, "Somehow I don't think you'd enjoy this particular subject." So I'm thinking, _Oh, Jesus, he's going to take pictures of something gross, or something evil, or something pervy like Harry in the shower._ There's some things you just don't photograph, like people in the shower. Especially not Harry Potter in the shower, because, you know, he gets irritable. And that's pervy so you never ever do it. Ever.

And then Malfoy says, "I'm willing to offer you a little monetary compensation for your trouble," and my ears perk up. Not that we're poor or anything, but Dad thinks me and Dennis need to learn the value of money, and apparently that means we don't get any. Which _I_ think is bollocks, but, then again, I'm just the kid with the camera. I made a little on the side this year taking pictures of couples on Valentine's day, but, you know, anything I can do to make more, so long as it isn't gross, evil or pervy.

So I ask him, "How much?"

And he says, "Oh, fifty Galleons or so." And I kind of have to pick my jaw up off the floor because I haven't seen so much gold in one place in my _life,_ except maybe in a jewelry store.

So I say, "Oh."

He nods. "I take it it's arranged, then?" And he goes on all about this elaborate plot he's got on how I'm supposed to give him the cameraobviously _he's_ too high and mighty to run the risk that someone will see me just give it to himand how I'm supposed to get it back, and how I ought to get him the pictures. And about all I can do is smile and nod, and think: _Fifty Galleons. Oh, my _god. A day can only get so weird, you know?

Then the linebackers throw me out in the hallway, which wasn't very nice at all.

Later on, you know, after I put my camera where Malfoy can get it without wounding his pride, I figure the whole thing out. I can be the double agent. See, all I have to do is make double prints of whatever pictures he gives me. They must be some kind of Mafia thing, since I can't see Malfoy taking pictures of something gross otherwise, and they won't be pervy pictures of people in showers or anything because you just don't do that. Not even if they leave the locker room door open after practice. So I reckon, they're going to be evil Mafia sort of pictures, and I can make extra prints and owl them to Dumbledore or the Ministry or whoever and expose the whole thing. And then I'll be a hero, and everyone will congratulate me, and maybe Ginny Weasley will kiss me with a heaving bosom like in those books of Aunt Clara's, and Harry Potter will just sort of smile...

Er, right.

We were talking about Malfoy?

Right.

So, you know, I get the camera back. And once I make sure it is my camera and no one's filed off the serial number or anything, I pop the film out and get my things together and run into my darkroom. Okay, so it's a disused lavatory on the seventh floor, but there's no windows and running water and the door locks and it isn't like there's a million dark rooms all over this castle, is there? Or maybe there are and I can't find them. So I process the film, and I wash it off and dry it and cut into lengths I can manage, and then I put the negatives in the enlarger and use light of my wand to focus it before I put down paper.

And I'm thinking, _Holy shit. _

The Mafia does this?

I make the prints, like he asked me to, and I put them in a nice envelope with all the negatives clipped together. I drop it off where he told me to and the next morning I pick up the money, and it's all there, which means that next Hogsmeade weekend I am _set._ Big Spender Creevey, that's what they'll call me, you know. I don't think I ever will find out what happened to those pictures, but that's okay, because I don't want to know, because Malfoy is a puppy-killing psyho and I had to sterilize my camera and for a week after I developed those prints, I had very strange dreams.

Well, not so much strange as...

...er...

Never mind.


	10. Control

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ron doesn't have his wand, Draco chokes on an ice pop, Gryffindors aren't afraid of their sister and it isn't any of Seamus's business.

**2 / Conversation**

I was very glad my birthday fell on a weekend, for once, because it meant I could hide in bed until Seamus got bored and went down to breakfast. He's a big believer in this horrible Muggle idea that you should punch somone's arm until it goes numb every birthday; it's absolutely barbaric, but everyone else in the dorm seems to get a kick out of it, as long as they're not the victim. He'd gotten me every year so far, though after the first time he had to ambush me in the mornings, hence my sleeping in. I really hate Harry sometimes for having his birthday in the summer.

When I was sure Seamus had finally gone, I climbed out of bed and screamed. _"Ginny!"_

She jumped off of Neville's bed and made a face like she was going to be sick, although I think it might've been meant to be a smile. She must've known she wasn't high on my list of people to see first thing in the morning today. "Er...happy birthday, Ron."

"You're not supposed to be in here!"

"Harry let me up." I reminded myself to kill Harry. "I wanted to apologize. For, for what I said last night."

I sighed. I would rather not have thought about last night, but she seemed really upset about it, and if there's one thing no one in my family can resist it's Ginny upset. Unfortunately, she knows it. "Can it wait until I'm dressed?" I asked.

"Oh. Okay. Of course."

I changed in the bathroom-I haven't changed clothes in front of Ginny since we were little-and stared at the door for a good long while, debating whether to go back out. It wasn't like she was going to go away any time soon, and I'd have to go past her to get breakfast. On the other hand, there wasn't much left to say that we both hadn't already told each other in the Common Room last night, for the most part at the tops of our voices, and rehashing it wouldn't do either of us any good. I'd have liked some time to lick my wounds in private, thank you. But she said she wanted to apologize...and I wasn't about spens my entire birthday hiding in a bathroom.

I rubbed my hands together and fixed my shirt. "Gryffindors are not afraid of their little sisters," I told myself sternly, and opened the door.

She was sitting on Neville's bed again, and before I even sat down she launched into a speech. "I'm really, really sorry about what I said, Ron, and I promise I'll never bring it up ever again. It was wrong of me to call you that and I shouldn't have listened to rumors or made and judgements before talking to you first. Your business is your business and that's none of my business and...and I just worry about you and I'm sorry. Really."

Well, that was less unpleasent than I'd expected. "Thanks."

"Are you still mad at me?" She looked at me apprehensively from under her fringe, like she used to when she was little.

I bit off a sarcastic, but honest, answer. "Of course not. Water under the bridge." I tied my shoe and glanced up at her; she was frowning. "Seriously, Ginny, it's no big deal. Forget it happened." _And leave me alone for a while._

She didn't say anything for a minute, so I thought it was okay. Then she said in the exact same tone of voice Hermione would use, "How can you be so casual about everything?"

"Define 'everything.'"

"About...don't you know what they call you behind you back?"

I'd known this was going to happen; now we got to retread the whole mess over again. "Yes, Ginny, I know. Contrary to popular belief, I'm not deaf." Though you wouldn't know from the way some people talked...

She looked appalled. "But don't you care?"

_Of course I bloody care. Somewhere along the line I flushed my own reputation down the toilet and now I have no idea how to get it back. _"Not really." I put my hand up to stop her launching into a tirade. "Look, people are idiots. I could care less about what they want to say, because the people who really matter know differently." Or I'd thought they did, at least, until last night. Call it surprise number sixteen billion for the year.

She opened her mouth and closed it a couple of times, then pinched the bridge of her nose like Percy does when he's really frustrated. "Ron, I feel like I don't know who you are lately. We hardly ever talk anymore, and then I hear these rumors, and I don't want to believe them, but...Will you tell me the truth about something?"

"Depends. Are you going to ask a question or demand an answer?"

She blushed at that, and I thought, g_ood. _She deserved it, after what she'd said. Just a little bit. She took a deep breath, bit her lip, then looked me in the eye and asked, "How many people have you slept with?"

"Three."

Her eyes went wide. "Just three?"

"Yes, just three." I leaned back on my elbows; I had a feeling this was going to go on a while. "It's not like you can go around this school having sex all willy-nilly, Gin. Besides, I'm not a, a, whatever the male equivalent is of a scarlet woman."

She nodded, then stared at her hands. "All right. But you do do...other things?"

"I have, yes." She seemed really uncomfortable about that, and for some reason, that made me sad. I always wanted to be the sort of person she could look up to, not someone she had to defend. Or attack, as the case may be. "Anything else?"

She swallowed. "Did you really...with Blaise Zabini...in the Quidditch cupboard?"

I felt my whole face go red, and now I looked at my hands rather than her face. "Yes."

"Oh."

"But we didn't do half the things every seems to think we did."

"Ah."

That about summed it all up right there. Her eyes dropped and her face tilted away and the disappointment in her voice made me want to crawl underneath the floorboards and die. Ginny was disappointed with me-I'd let her down, without even realizing it, and gained absolutely nothing in the balance. Failure again. I could deal with it if she hated me, I could probably even deal with it if she was disgusted with me...but she was disappointed. _Only_ disappointed.

That left the hate and disgust up to me.

"Ginny..."

She could still look me in the eye, thankfully. "What?"

_I'm sorry. I don't know how these things happen to me. I want you to be proud of me again. I want my reputation back. _"Nothing. Nothing at all." I stood up and brushed the creases out of my clothes. "I'm going down to breakfast, are you coming?"

**4 / Instigation**

 After dinner Harry and Hermione deposited me in a chair by the fireplace, then conjured up both a crowd and a stack of presents. "Happy birthday, Ron," Hermione said cheerfully, and gave me a kiss on the cheek. It was nice to know that at least some people didn't think I was contaminated or something.

Harry shoved a heavy package covered with about three layers of Spellotape into my lap. He has really got to stop wrapping things without adult supervision. "Open mine first."

"Gee, Harry, did you think it was going to escape?" I managed to find the one square centimeter that wasn't taped down and wrestled the paper off from there. It turned out to be a broomstick servicing kit like his; I reckoned there was more wrong with my Shooting Star than a good polish could fix, but then again, it's supposed to be the thought that counts.

Hermione gave me a book, to the astonishment of absolutely no one, although since it was a Quidditch book I decided I could forgive her. Mum and Dad sent me a cardigan and some extra pocket money, and Ginny got me the biggest piece of Honeyduke's chocolate I'd ever seen. You could've used it for a doorstop, I swear. Percy also sent me a book, a chess book, which was slightly less forgivable. I was watching the knight on the cover club an opposing pawn to death when Hermione poked me on the knee.

"Do you know who this one is from?" she asked, handing me a flat, squarish package. "There isn't a card or a tag on it."

I looked it over and shrugged. It was wrapped in shiny gray paper with thin green ribbon, and not a spot of Spellotape in sight. Whoever had wrapped it needed to give Harry lessons. I broke the ribbon, and the paper fell away in one big piece, revealing another book-but there was nothing stamped on the dark gray binding, no title or anything. Curiously, I cracked the cover and peeked inside.

It was full of pornographic pictures of Draco Malfoy.

I slammed it shut, but now everyone was staring at me, probably trying to guess who'd sent it. Not, of course, like I was going to tell them. Well, possibly in a next century or so, but not until then. "What is it?" Harry asked.

I swallowed hard so that my voice would sound normal. "Nothing."

Seamus smirked at me. "You wouldn't be blushing like that if it was nothing, Weasley. Out with it."

"It's nothing. Really." I shoved the Photo Album of Evil under the cardigan and rubbed my hands together briskly. "What's next, then?"

Seamus, however, is a nosey bastard who doesn't know when to let a subject drop. He jumped on me, nearly flipping the chair over, and tried to grab the album. We wrestled over it, and he came a little too close to breaking my grip. "Finnigan, let go!" I growled.

He climbed about halfway into my lap; I might've enjoyed that, under other circumstances, and if he were anyone else on the face of the planet. "I just wanna see it!"

"Well, you can't!"

"Come one, Weasley, just a peek!"

"It's none of yourbloody_business!"_ Seamus is a hell of a lot stronger than he looks, and I wasn't exactly in the best position to throw him off. I wrapped one arm around the album, hugged it to my chest, and tried to shove Seamus away with the other; he grabbed onto the nearest thing for balance, which, unfortunately for everyone involved, happened to be Harry. _He _tripped and fell on top of Seamus, and they both went tumbling onto the gifts I had yet to open. Specifically, Seamus landed on top of the package from Fred and George, and a moment later, Harry landed on top of a very large and badly startled orangutan.

I got the book back, though.

Harry yelped and scrambled to his feet. The orangutan looked around, scratched its head, then asked, "Ook?"

Hermione climbed to her feet quickly and leveled her wand at him. "Seamus, hold very still," she ordered him, in a sort of fake-reassuring tone of voice.

Orangutan Seamus didn't seemed very reassured. He screamed "Ook!" and scrambled away on all fours, and tried to climb Dean. "Ook ook ook!"

_"Arrgh!_ Seamus, gerroff!"

"Hold him still, Dean!"

"I'm trying!"

_"Ook!"_

"Gerroff me!"

_"Homomorphus!_ Oops, sorry, Colin..._homomo..._Seamus, come back here! _Homomorphus!"_

It turns out that orangutans are really quite fast. And strong. And have a great love of bananas. It took a full quarter of an hour to get Seamus put right, and another ten minutes to get him off the chandelier in one piece. When we dared actually open the remains of the twins' package, it turned out to be nothing more dangerous than musical boxers shorts and some trick candy that was still mostly edible. Not that anyone would willingly eat it, coming from them, but like I said, it's the thought that counts.

I slipped the album under my seat cushion for the rest of the evening. Nobody asked after it.

**6 / Investigation**

Dean was snoring. Neville was snoring. Seamus, after liberal application of a Calming Charm and some profuse apologies, was snoring. Harry wasn't snoring, but he never does; I reckon, if he ever had, his bastard relatives found some way to make him quit it a long time ago. I was the only person left awake in the dormitory, and there was no way I was going to get to sleep any time soon. The most evil picture book in the world was burning a metaphorical hole in my mattress.

I pulled it out of its hiding place and looked at it, which was silly, because my bed curtains were closed and I couldn't see a blessed thing. I wasn't quite sure why I hadn't chucked it into the fire when no one was looking, or dumped it in the bin, or perhaps owled it anonymously to Professor Dumbledore with a note demanding Malfoy's expulsion. Blackmail, I decided; this stuff would make excellent blackmail in case of...something. I'd know what it was when I saw it. And, anyway, I couldn't get rid of it when I hadn't even looked through it properly yet. It was pure morbid curiosity, of course, not any actual desire to see Malfoy running around starkers, because I'd had quite enough of that in one lifetime. Plus, I reckoned I could use the laugh.

I lit my wand and opened the album at random. There was just one picture centered on each page, no captions or notes at all. As if that was really necessary. In one photo, Malfoy slowly performed a striptease, easing his shirt off with agonizing slowness; in another, he was down to his shorts and groping himself through the fabric. I flipped a few pages ahead, and found a picture of Malfoy eating an ice pop. A simple red ice pop, like my mum used to make during the summer, mostly just colored sugar water in the solid state; except Malfoy wasn't just eating it, he was _molesting _it. He slid his tongue around its tip, bobbed his head up and down its length, and let it melt and dribble and run down his chin and neck and arm. When he was finished with it, his lips were stained bloodred, like a parody of lipstick, and he smiled around the stained little wooden stick he held clenched in his teeth. I turned the page before he could conjure up another one.

I found myself on the last page of the album, then; there was just one picture there, but it was probably the worst of all. Malfoy was completely naked, except for those thigh-high come-fuck-me-boot he'd worn last summer. He was sitting on the end of a bed, in his dormitory, if all the green upholstry was any indication. Slowly, like he was performing for an audience again, he took himself in hand and started to wank, and for some reason I could not look away from the long girl fingers that stroked his rising length. I watched picture-Malfoy gasp and squirm and squeeze himself, watched his hips thrust forward into his own grip, watch him throw his head back, and arch off the mattress, and come with his mouth hanging open. I watched him slowly regain his breath, and look at me as if he could see me through the picture, and ever-so-slowly lick his sticky fingers clean.

I slammed the book shut. I tried to shove back under the mattress, but I was so wound up I dropped it onto the floor. (Wound up disgusted, I mean, not wound up...well). Seamus stopped snoring for a few seconds, but luckily the noise didn't actually wake anyone up, and after a moment I decided it was safe to breath again. I bent over the edge of the bed and tried to gather the book up, and it was then that I noticed the piece of parchement that had slid out from between two pages. If I'd been looking more carefully, I'd have found it sooner. Malfoy's handwriting, although he hadn't signed it: _Come to the dungeons to get the rest of your gift._

I crushed the note in one hand and stared into the lit end of my wand for what seemed like ages..

_It couldn't hurt just to have a look..._

Finally I crawled out of bed to tuck the photo album back under my mattress, where it belonged. It had fallen open to the picture of Malfoy with the ice pop; he had a blue one now, but as I watched he accidently broke a piece off the end and choked. Served the little git right, and it seemed like good auspices to go on. I stuffed the book away, then crept across the room and peeked through Harry's bedcurtains. He was sprawled out on his back with his mouth open-kind of cute, really. Not that I was far enough around the bend to think of Harry like _that._ I shook his shoulder until he blinked at me and squinted. "Errrugh? Whuzza?"

"Harry, can I borrow your cloak?"

"Uh?"

"Cloak, Harry."

"Nkay..."

He rolled over and buried his face in the pillows. Probably wouldn't even remember that I'd been awake later. Good thing, too, because if he asked in the morning what I wanted the cloak for, I wasn't sure what I was going to tell him. Not, of course, that there'd be anything to tell.

**8 / Capitulation**

I found the right dungeon eventually, although it seemed like I'd had to stick my head into every door below the castle first. It was dark like all the others, but the moment I stepped inside the lamps burst into flame, to reveal Malfoy reclining with his feet on a table. Thank Merlin, he was dressed; I'd been worried that he'd show up naked, since that seemed like the sort of thing he'd do, being a psycho bastard and all. But, no, he wore a gray shirt, black trousers that were tighter than is strictly decent and-I swallowed-those bloody thigh-high boots. I loitered in the doorway, debating with myself, and almost didn't notice his growing look of confusion until he stood up and started peering at me with a scowl that almost looked nervous. It took me a minute to remember that I was invisible.

I got a satisfying little start out of him when I shed Harry's cloak, although he pulled himself together too fast for me to enjoy it. "Evening, Malfoy," I said. Like I did this sort of thing every day, you know?

He smiled, looked almost lazy, and strode up to me with a swing in his step I was beginning to loathe. "Many happy returns, Weasley. Like your present?"

"Oh, yes, I had a good laugh over it. Did you take those pictures yourself?" I don't think I sounded half as casual as I'd wanted, but it wasn't entirely my fault. Trousers and evil footwear aside, Malfoy was a bit, well, distracting; his top two shirt buttons were open and I could see a sizable slice of skin through the gap. Even though I wasn't looking, I mean. It bothered me.

He just plain bothered me all over, actually, especially when he stood close enough to breathe my air. "That wasn't what I meant." He pressed his hand against my chest and started sliding it lower, a rough caress, while my heart shot into my throat and my mouth went dry. He seemed amused by my reaction. "Well?" He stopped with his fingers on my belt. "Aren't you going to unwrap me?"

In a triumph of will and determination, I took one step backwards-just enough to get out of his reach. Laugh if you don't think that's difficult, but obviously you've never been a position like it, with Malfoy standing there, offering himself, and his shirt unbuttoned and his voice doing this little _thing_ on the end of the phrase. I took a step back and folded my arms and swallowed hard. "I thought you weren't like _that,_" I spat at him.

He shrugged fluidly. "Perhaps I've changed my mind." Oh-so-casual. Completely assured. Oh, yes, I just decided to be a fag one day, can I fuck you? Bastard.

I rolled my eyes at him and sneered. "Or _perhaps_ you just want another...what did you call me? A 'convenience?'"

His face fell for a minute, and I thought I saw his cheeks pink a little; five points to Gryffindor. But then he reached up and caressed my face, a touch that sent little tingly feelings up and down my spine. "Let's not dredge up ancient history, Weasley."

I tried to twist away. "That was six weeks ago."

"Same difference."

I batted his hand down and pushed around him, towards the door. "Sorry, Malfoy. Maybe another time."

His eyes bugged out like he couldn't believe what he was hearing, which would've been funny in another situation. I reached for the door, which was still just barely cracked, and started to pull it open; Malfoy suddenly threw all his weight against it to slam it shut. My fingers were wrapped around the edge of the door, and when he pushed it, I didn't have enough time to pull them away. The little git crushed my hand between the door and the frame so hard I was surprised that none of my fingers just dropped off. _"AAAAAAaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh FUCK!"_

Malfoy leapt away like I was on fire and scuffed the floor with his hideous boots. "Sorry."

_"Sorry?_ Fuck, Malfoy, that fucking _hurt_..." I dared examine my hand; a dark red mark crossed the second joint of three fingers, and it hurt like hell when I tried to flex them. Given time it'd be one hell of a bruise.

Malfoy rolled his eyes and mumbled something irritable. He stared at me while I massaged my hand, trying to figure out if he'd broken any bones with that little manoeuver. Bastard. Crazy, evil, clumsy, _stupid_ bastard. Who all of a sudden reached out towards me. "Give it here."

I cradled my hand against my chest and backed away. "No."

"What do you think I'm going to do, Weasley, bite it off?" Possibly, but before I could tell him that he pulled his wand out of his back pocket (which was frankly amazing, considering how tight those trousers were). It was only then that I recalled leaving my own wand all the way back up in Gryffindor Tower. Oh, hell. "Give me your bloody hand."

I extended my hand towards him-I didn't have much choice, not when I couldn't defend myself-and he grabbed me by the wrist and jerked me forwards. He's stronger than he looks. I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for him to hex me, then yelped again when he squeezed my fingers. I looked just in time to see him press the tip of his wand against my palm and cast one of the basic healing charms we learned last year. The pain in my fingers melted away, he let go, and I was left feeling like extremely big ass.

We stood and stared at each other for quite a while; he was blocking the door. I averted my eyes first. He folded his arms and tapped his foot, sending the harsh echoes reverberating around the room, then finally sighed melodramatically. "What's the magic word?"

"Which one?" I snapped.

"I didn't have to fix your hand, you know," he said petulantly "Or couldn't your parents afford to teach you common courtesy?"

I grated my teeth and clenched my fists, because even if I fully intended to pound him into a thin paste on the floor, I knew the moment I jumped on him we'd end up doing something else entirely.

"I'm waiting, Weasley."

Fucking evil crazy stupid _bastard._

I took a deep breath, raised my chin, and looked him straight in the eye. "Thank you." It sounded more like a death threat than anything else, which was my point, but from the way he smirked I might as well have knelt down and kissed those blasted boots.

He took one step forward and patted my cheek. "Good boy." Before I could pull away, his hand slid around to grab the back of my head and he kissed me, pushing me backwards across the room and against the table. I grabbed his shoulders as if to push him away, but for some reason I can't quite explain, I didn't follow through. I just held onto him and let him lead.

He pushed me back against the table and practically straddled me, those painted-on trousers getting even tighter by the second. He held me around the waist with on arm and clenched the opposite hand in my hair, and he kissed me like fireworks and cinnamon and he tasted like wintergreen. This was good, this felt really good; and I knew that it would only get better, especially with full use of my arms this time, if I let it. He ground his hips against mine and started to fumble with my clothes one-handed, and felt really fucking amazing, and if I stayed where I was it going to feel great. And I'd have to sneak back into the Tower in the morning and give Harry back his cloak, and explain where I'd spent the night this time, and look my little sister in the eye.

And I stopped.

I wrenched myself away from Malfoy's mouth, and pushed him away as hard as I could. He went flying , tripped over his own feet and landed in a heap on the floor. "What the hell?" he demanded indignantly. His lower lip was curled in the beginning of a pout.

"Good night, Malfoy." I put my belt back in order...just how the hell had he managed to unfasten it already, anyway? I straightened myself up and snatched Harry's cloak off the floor.

Malfoy scrambled to his feet, although he seemed to be having some trouble in those boots. "God damn it! You ten-Sickle _slut!_ Don't you dare tell me you didn't want that!"

"Not that much, I don't." I put on the cloak so I wouldn't have to look at the front of my own trousers and left about as quickly as I could without running. I was never going to run away from a Malfoy. I felt my way along the dungeon walls, in the direction of the nearest staircase, concentrating on not tripping or snagging the cloak on the rough edges of stone. Malfoy ran out after me, fuming, but he obviously couldn't guess which was I'd gone, because he stood in the middle of the corridor and started screaming incoherently; he seemed to think he knew quite a bit about my family, my House, my friends, and my personal habits. As I rounded the corner, I nearly stepped on Mrs. Norris, who was trotting towards Malfoy with her tail straight up in the air. Where she went, Filch followed; that was reason enough to run. Malfoy didn't seem to notice a thing.

By the time I got all the way back to Gryffindor I had calmed down completely. I put Harry's cloak away without waking him up, put my pajamas back on, and climbed into bed. Alone. Just like I had every night for the last six or seven weeks. Whereas, unless a miracle had occurred, Malfoy was down in the dungeons trying to explain himself to Filch. If he hadn't already been given a month's worth of detentions for being a freak on school grounds or something, of course. I smiled at the mental image of Malfoy scrubbing floors in those stupid boots.

_I win,_ I thought, and drifted off to sleep. 


	11. Sympathy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Percy sends a letter, Draco gets a letter, Harry is a Man of Virtue and Ron is a man of principles.

Ginny came down to dinner giggling. "What's so funny?" I asked her.

"Percy."

"Huh?"

Hermione poked me in the arm. "Don't talk with your mouth full."

"My mouth isn't full."

"Not yet it isn't."

I put down my spoon and leaned across the table to look at my sister. "What's so funny about Percy?"

"Oh, it's nothing really, he just sent me this letter..." She broke out in another fit of giggles.

I frowned. "Since when did Percy write funny letters?"

"You'd have to read it."

"Have you got it?"

She pulled a crisp piece of Ministry parchment out of her bag, or what had been a crisp piece of Ministry parchment before it had got into her bag. She paused with her arm half-extended. "Ron? Promise you won't get mad at him?"

I said, "Of course not," before I snatched the letter out of her hand, because she really did sound concerned. It was short, which was unusual enough, because...well, compared to way he writes, Perce doesn't talk much at all. One of these days he's going to give Hermes a hernia.

"Ron!" Hermione sniffed. "That was rude."

"I promised, didn't I?"

"Go on and let him read it," Ginny said, leaning across the table. "But, Ron, please, don't be angry..."

"I won't be." I flattened the letter against the table and started reading.   
_Dear Ginny,_

Thank you for your letter of the sixth of March. I am very sorry to hear of your difficulties with Professor Snape, but I trust that they will sort themselves out in the end. I do hope you are being attentive in class. Education is a serious business, and never you mind the examples that some people may have set. Your Ordinary Wizarding Levels are swiftly approaching, and you should not allow yourself to become lax...

"Blah, blah, blah," I muttered. "What's so funny about this?"  
She reached out and flipped the paper over. "Here, the next paragraph...start there."  
_I must get right to the point, for there has been something troubling me of late, and I hope you may be of assistance in putting my mind at ease. To be blunt, I have been hearing rumors of the most outlandish and unsavory sort regarding our brother Ron, and while I have tried to ignore them, I find their persistance and perfidy both disturbing and disheartening. I hope you may be able to reassure me as you are much closer to the source of the trouble and would know far more about the situation than I. _

Is Ron experimenting with drugs? Because if he is, he should stop it right now. To begin with he is breaking seventy-six different school rules, some of them twice, and I'm not entirely certain about another ten or so. He can't expect to do well on exams if he's not in control of his own faculties, after all, and after his performance on the O.W.L.s he really ought to be applying himself more. As he is already of a delicate temperament I should think he wouldn't wish to excite himself further with strange potions and the like. I hope you wouldn't keep something like this to yourself if you know about it, because Mum and Father have the right to know, and it really is for his own good if he's punished. He is bright enough to know better.

Give everyone my regards and please reply promptly.

You brother,  
Percival Q. Weasley

I looked up at Ginny, who smiled sort of uneasily for about five and a half seconds. Then we both busted up laughing.

"Let me see that." Hermione snatched the letter away from me (speaking of being rude, and all) and scanned it quickly. Her jaw dropped. "Ron, this is horrible! He has no right to say all this about you...and why on Earth would he think you're on drugs?"

"Search me." I said once I managed to breathe properly again. "I've never understood how Percy thinks."

"But the things he said about you...!"

"He says that stuff all the time," Ginny said. "It would be weirder if he didn't say anything."

"Besides, it's better if he's on about this stuff than...you know, other stuff."

"I suppose..."

Percy, as far as I knew, had never heard anything about my sex life, and I was very grateful for that, because as far as I'm concerned those two are mutually exclusive. Although, when I think about it, he and Penny must do _something_ in the evenings...not that I would really want to know. Anyway, if he wanted to think I was on drugs, he was welcome to it, because that I could deny with a clean conscience. I hadn't had much of anything _to_ deny recently, though; after nine weeks of virtuous living, it seemed like even the biggest dunderheads in the rumour mill had got the idea, and I could actually be seen in someone's company without being accused of...well, you know what. Even Seamus had shut up. It bordered on miraculous.

Harry finally decided to put in an appearance, and started serving himself before he even sat down. "Where you been, mate?" I asked him.

"Dumbledore," he mumbled, and then started stuffing himself. And that said it all, really; he wasn't allowed to tell what went on when he got dragged into the Headmaster's office, so we'd given up asking. Quite a conversation-stopper, that was. Between swallows he managed to ask, "What's new with you?"

I shrugged. "Not much. Percy thinks I'm on drugs."

"Mwhuh?"

"Don't talk with your mouthful."

"Lay off, Hermione." She tut-tutted us and went back to her book. "He wrote a letter to Ginny and he thinks I'm on drugs. Dunno why."

Harry swallowed again. "You think he knows about...?"

"Nah. If he knew about _that_ I probably would've gotten a Howler." I glanced at Ginny; I had something to tell Harry, but there was no way I was doing it with her in earshot. (Hermione was reading, and anyway, she doesn't really count, being Hermione.) "Oi, Gin, how's things with you and Neville?"

She nearly choked on a carrot. "What do you mean?"

"Well, you've been looking at each other awfully funny the last couple of days..."

Her ears turned red and she tossed her hair over her shoulders. "I don't know what you mean..."

"Oh, you know, the big dewey eyes, the pouty lower lip...you might want to mention that's not a good look for him..."

"Ronald Weasley, you are impossible." She stuck her tongue out at me and left the table.

Harry frowned. "What was that about?"

"Decoy. Bet you a Sickle she goes and tells him all about it." I pulled his plate out of his reach. "Will you stop and breathe for a minute? I need your advice."

"About what?"

"A girl."

"A girl?"

"Keep your voice down!"

He smirked at me. "_You_ want advice from _me_ about a girl? I may have to write this down."

"Yes, yes, it's very ironic, will you let me talk?" He made a "go ahead" gesture with one hand, and I took a deep breath. "Okay, she's a friend of Ginny's in Ravenclaw, named Allison. She's really sweet, she's got a sense of humor, and yes, before you even ask, she is very attractive, so shut up."

"I wasn't going to say a word." He glanced over his shoulder at the Ravenclaw table. "Where is she?"

"She's not there, now quit looking."

He blinked at me. "What's with you, Ron? You haven't been this worked up about somebody since fifth year."

"Yeah, and I haven't kept anyone more than two weeks since then, either."

"What about Michael?"

"Forget him," I said, "we're talking about _Allison."_

"Okay, okay...she must really be something."

She definitely was; to start with, she looked at me like a normal human being and not a side-show attraction. Ginny had introduced us on the last Hogsmeade weekend, and she'd just smiled at me and shaken my hand like I'd never done anything dumb. "I don't want to screw up this time, Harry. I want to do things right, for a change."

"That's great, Ron, but I don't know how I can help you.'

"Well, you're doing the whole Man of Virtue thing, saving yourself and all that...what would you do?" I never did find out, it turns out, because Harry had barely opened his mouth when Lucius Malfoy started screaming.

_"YOU DISAPPOINT ME."_

Every single person in the Great Hall jumped about six feet out of their chair. Well, except for Draco Malfoy, who sat at the very end of the Slytherin table and didn't seem to be moving or breathing. Then every single person in the Great Hall jumped up to get a better look at the Howler, and I couldn't see much of anything except Ginny trying to coax Neville out from under the table.

_"I HAD THOUGHT,"_ Malfoy continued, in a tone that should've had icicles forming on the rafters, _"THAT YOU WOULD HAVE MORE RESPECT FOR THE NAME YOU CARRY THAN TO CONSORT WITH FELLATORS AND CATAMITES. IT GRIEVES ME TO FIND I WAS MISTAKEN. WHEN YOU CHOOSE TO APOLOGIZE, I MAY ELECT TO BE MERCIFUL; UNTIL THAT TIME YOU MAY NO LONGER CONSIDER YOURSELF MY SON. LET IT NEVER BE SAID THAT ANY TRUE MALFOY LOWERS HIMSELF TO THE VICE OF FAGGOTRY."_

There was a beat of complete silence, and then _everyone_ started talking, at a whisper; it sounded like a den of snakes. Quite a few people were laughing about it, although some of the younger students looked confused. Harry shook his head in bewilderment. "That was...interesting."

"That was horrible." Hermione finally put her book away started fiddling with her utensils. "It's almost enough to make me feel sorry for him."

"Nothing is enough to make me feel sorry for him," I said. Although I suppose it would be horrible to be outed like thatworse than getting caught by a professor, at any rate.

Harry raised his eyebrows at me. "After all the crap he's given you about boys, I'd've thought you'd be laughing your head off."

"It's Malfoy. He doesn't matter."

Hermione shrugged. "It makes a certain amount of sense, for him to lash out at others because of his own underlying insecurities. Although it does raise questions about his obsession with Harry."

"Huh?"

"_What_ obsession?"

"Oh, you knowhe always goes out of his way to insult you, he follows you around between classes, that whole Quidditch thing..."

"That's not an obsession, that's just Malfoy being an ass," I said.

Harry frowned. "He follows me?"

"Yes."

"No."

"Why are you arguing with me?"

_Because he follows _me_._ "I'm not arguing."

"Yes, you are."

"No, I am _not."_

"You just did!"

"Actually, he was just contradicting you."

"Oh, hush up, Harry."

I tossed my fork down. "Look, Hermione, Malfoy's not obsessed with Harry."

"How do you know?"

"I know because I know Malfoy!"

"I thought Malfoy didn't matter."

"Shut up, Harry."

"Ron," she said oh-so-reasonably, as if she were explaining the Charms homework to me, "he's obsessed. Everyone thinks so. Doesn't that imply something to you?"

"Yeah, that everyone's stupid."

"Ron!"

I grabbed my bag and stood up, because I wasn't about to get a lecture from her on this, like she could learn love and hate from a table in a textbook. "I'll see you later, Harry," I mumbled, and left. Hermione just clucked her tongue and shook her head. Sometimes I have to restrain myself from strangling her.

I found Malfoy in the entrance hall, walking very slowly and very stiffly, with his eyes fixed over everyone's heads. Most of the people in the hall ignored him, but a few of them were pointing and whispering, or laughing like asses. Justin and I had gotten the same treatment after the Greenhouse Incident; I still got it from some of the stupider ones, from time to time. Malfoy, being Malfoy, should've been setting bits of them on fire or threatening some horrible retribution from his father...although that'd have probably gone over like a lead balloon just then. But he was just walking past them like they weren't even there, with his face so completely blank that it hurt to look at it, and his eyes fixed over their heads at the middle distance.

I tried, experimentally, tapping him on the shoulder. Just to see what he'd do, mind you. "Malfoy?"

Instead of turning around, like a normal person, he ran. I had to chase him.

Well, I didn't _have _to chase him. I could've just ignored him, because he was a crazy person, and they do that sort of thing all the time. But I sort of had an idea that maybe the blankness wasn't a good thing, and maybe Malfoy shouldn't exactly be alone just then, or at least left unattended around wands and pointy objects. Not that I cared if he topped himself, because he didn't matter, but...well...look, it's a _principle_ thing. Death equals bad, and all. That's not the important bit, anyway.

The important thing is he ran, and I chased him, and I bet those twits in the entrance hall got a good kick out of the whole thing. I came close to catching him a couple of times, but he was crazy and kept dodging out of the way. And, okay, I wasn't exactly watching where I was going, and I sort of...fell on a trick staircase. But just the once, so don't believe a damned thing Peeves says. He probably pushed me.

Eventually Malfoy ducked inside a classroom and slammed the door behind him, and I stopped with my hand on the knob. For all I knew, he was waiting to hex my head off on the other side. I stepped behind a convenient suit of armor and pointed my wand at the door. _"Alohomora."_

It swung open, and a white-hot curse flew out and scorched the opposite wall, leaving behind a greasy, sour smell. When it wasn't followed by friends, I stuck my head into the doorway; the classroom was completely dark. "Malfoy?"

Another curse, though this went wide and hit the doorframe. I got the impression of a bunch of desks and chairs in dusty stacks in the brief flash of light. It occurred to me that I was an easy target, silhouetted against the doorway, when a third curse sailed over my head. _In or out,_ I told myself, and stepped fully into the darkened room. "Malfoy, where are you?"

"Go the fuck away." His voices sounded funny, choked and hoarse.

"Will you quit trying to kill me for a moment?"

"No."

Well, at least he was honest about it.

"Why did you follow me?" he asked, sullenly, like I'd just taken his sweets away.

"I just wanted..." ..._to make sure you were alright_ suddenly sounded like the worst possible way to end that sentence. Because I didn't care about Malfoy one way or another. He did _not_ matter.

While I groped for words, he snorted. "To point and laugh? To rub it in? Punish me for..." He trailed off, like he was having trouble breathing. _Oh, shit,_ I thought, _what if he is topping himself in here?_

"I think the morons downstairs are taking care of most of that," I said, feeling my way along the wall. The curses, and his voice, were coming from the far corner of the room. "They'll get bored with it eventually."

"How do you know?"

"Well, they did with me..." Most of them, anyway. And the ones left didn't matter. Much like Malfoy. Who had better not be dying on the other side of the room while I stuck my hands in cobwebs that could very well still be occupied...I don't know how these sorts of things happen to me.

He was quiet for so long that I thought he really was dead, until he asked softly, "Why are you here?" He didn't sound quite so sullen anymore.

I felt something crawl across my hand. A big something. I shook it off _hard_ and backpedaled a few steps before I answered him. "Are you going to kill yourself?"

He snorted again. "Of course not. Malfoys don't go around laying open veins and arteries all willy-nilly without a good reason."

_And being called a disgusting pervert in public by your own dad isn't a good reason?_ "They also don't fuck boys, I understand."

"So you _are _here to make fun of me."

"I'm just making an observation."

"Well, _don't_."

I groped a few more feet along the wall, biting my lip when I felt the tickle of silk across the backs of my hands. I could hear Malfoy making weird hiccuping noises, and I called out, "Are you sure you're not dying?"

He seemed to think for a minute. "No."

_Damn it all._ If he were just being melodramatic about it all I'd kill him. I finally came to a cornerthat wall had to have been fifty feet longand felt the smooth slate of a chalkboard under my fingers. "Then why're you hiding in here?"

"Malfoys don't hide."

"What d'you call this, then?"

"You chased me in here."

"I was chasing you because I thought you were going to jump out a window."

"How touching."

Why the hell was I doing this, again? principles, that's right. "I'd do the same for anyone."

He went quiet again. I called his name a couple of times, but he wouldn't answer me. Or couldn't, but I was starting to think maybe he wasn't dyingI wasn't that lucky. I found out for certain when I stuck my foot out and hit something that yelped, then kicked me in the shin. "Ow! Malfoy, what the fuck is your problem? _Lumos."_ I stuck my lit wand out in front of me to find out.

He was crying, or he'd been crying, and his face was red and puffy from it. Three shiney wet tracks shone on his face, one down each side and one under his nose. He climbed to his feet and stared me down with his chin in the air, arms folded. "Well?" he asked. Brittle-sounding.

"I...er...I..." _Think, Weasley, what would an intelligent person do right now? _"I'll just, er...I'll go." I exited as fast as I could, keeping my eyes on the door rather than the boy behind me, or the line of broken spiderwebs along the near wall. I shut the door behind me and sank to the floor. "That went well," I muttered to myself. Though it was hard to tell, in hindsight, which of us was more embarrassed.

A few moments later, I heard another set of footsteps coming down the corridor. I jumped to my feet and came face-to-face with Virgil Moon. You know, hand cough person. The weirdo. He stopped about five feet away from me and asked, "Is Malfoy in there?"

My razor-sharp intellect leapt into action, and I pressed myself flat against the door. "No."

Moon nodded. "Well, when he comes out, tell him that Professor Snape wants to talk to him, and not to die, or it'll be ten points from Slytherin."

I stared at the back of his head as he walked away. _Thank Merlin I don't have to share a dormitory with him._

After about ten minutes, Malfoy came out under his own power. He'd cleaned his face somehow, and he looked more or less normal (well, for _him_ anyway) if you didn't count how his eyes were all bloodshot. We just sort of looked at each other.

"Er," I said, "Professor Snape"

"I heard."

"You did."

"Yes."

He looked at the carpet, so I looked at the wall. There were two big black marks in the stone, that overlapped, so they looked like a figure eight. I couldn't right away think of a curse that would scorch stone like that, although knowing Malfoy it could very well have been some kind if illegal Dark magic that we weren't supposed

"Thank you."

My head snapped around, but he was already walking away. I called out his name, and he turned around.

"What?"

I stared with my mouth handing open like a genius. "...er...never mind."

He frowned a bit, then went around the turn in the corridor and he was gone.


	12. Altruism

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ron writes, Draco snickers, and anything could be a devious prelude to sex.

"Are you planning on coming back to Gryffindor this term?"

"Depends on what time it is," I said.

Harry looked at his watch. "Eh...about ten o'clock."

"Then come check my pulse in eleven hours."

He frowned at me. "Ron, are you feeling okay?"

I wrestled my Herbology textbook out of my bag and flipped to the index. "Oh, yes. Except for the sense of impending doom, I'm super."

"What are you working on, anyway?" He unrolled one of the scrolls. "_Potions?_ I thought you finished this weeks ago!"

"So did I. How d'you spell 'perambulating'?"

"I dunnowhat did you forget to do?"

"The sixth scroll."

_"How?"_

I snatched the first scroll of my essay out of his hand and knocked three more off the table. "It's none of your business." And if he wasn't going to help he could bugger off and let me work in peace. I had at least another three feet to fill and eleven hours to do that in. That came out to, what, three inches an hour? I could write three inches in an hour. Of course I could.

Harry said quietly, "You couldn't read your own writing after you took down the assignment, could you?"

"Shut up."

Just because he was finished and could _be_ that annoying, Harry perched on the end of the library table. "You didn't seem too worried last week..."

I glared at him. "Because I didn't realize I wasn't done until Sunday night."

"And you still left this long?"

"I didn't _leave it,_" I snapped. "I worked on it Sunday night, but we had Quidditch practice on Monday."

"And yesterday?"

What was this, the Spanish Inquisition? "Yesterday," I said slowly, "I had a date with Allison."

"Oh, right..."

I rolled my eyes and flipped through the textbook. Page one hundred seventeen...seventeen...or was that seventy-one? _Damn it._

"How was that, anyway?"

"What was what?"

"Your date," Harry said slowly. What did he think I was, stupid?

"Nice," I told him, "lovely. We walked around the lake and then we sat under the Quidditch stands."

He raised his eyebrows. "That's all?"

"What do you mean, all?"

"It just sounds sort of...boring."

"We sat. We talked. It was nice. What's so boring about that?"

He looked at the ceiling; he obviously wanted out of the conversation as quickly as possible. I wasn't feeling that charitable. "I didn't mean in was _boring_ boring, I meant...well, it's what, your third date? And you're still just talking and holding hands?"

"Harry, I told you, I don't want to screw things up with her."

"I know, I know...but I'm thinking there's a difference between going slowly and not going anywhere at all."

I slammed the book; it turned out I didn't care too much about page one hundred whatever anyway. "If you're just going to sit there and criticize my love life, then you can leave, okay? I've got thirty-five more inches to write."

He scowled at me and left. Maybe I was a bit harsh, but he had no business going around telling me what to do with Allison, at least not until he'd actually done something with someone himself. If I'd wanted to do more with Allison I could'venot that I didn't want to do, you know, more, but I didn't _want_ to. What I mean is that she's a very attractive girl and there was a whole lot of "more" I wouldn't mind doing to her, but I didn't want to end up in the same situation I had in with Michael and Lisa and every other person I'd ever dated. Harry was supposed to understand that, instead of complaining that we weren't fooling around enough. What did he care if I fooled around, anyway? If anything, he was the one who needed to fool around more, relieve some of that tension, instead of going around sticking his nose in other people's sex lives, boring or not..._not_ that mine was boring...what the hell page was that, anyway?

Six hours later, I knew I wasn't going to make it.

"'The roots...of the Per-am-byoo-late-ing...Cypress...are used...in many...preparations...for...' For what?" I looked back to my Herbology book, but the words were all swimmy, and the candlelight made my eyes water and ache. I had to write at least another foot and a half for Snape to even accept it, but the library was cold and I was so damned _tired..._"Fuck Snape, then."

"Mmm. Kinky."

I turned so fast I fell out of my chair. I knocked it over, half-cleared the table, landed on my bottom and looked up at Draco bloody Malfoy, smirking like the weird crazy bastard he is. "What are you doing here?" I demanded.

"I could ask you the same thing."

"I'm researched the legal rights of house elves." I climbed to my feet and started picking up everything that had fallen. "What do you think you're playing at, sneaking up on me?"

He handed me a quill, like it was some great gesture for him to sully his hands with it. "Oh, I was just in the neighborhood and got curious," he said airily.

"Yeah, well, didn't you mum ever tell you curiousity killed the ferret?" I sat down and tried to go back to writing.

He peeked over my shoulder. "It might help if you used some ink."

_Damn _it. "Do you have somewhere else to be?"

He sat down on the edge of the table, just like Harry had, and sighed theatrically. "Unfortunately, no. I seem to have been stood up."

I obliterated half a paragraph with a single blot. "What's the matter, you forget to pay in advance?" _Not_ that I gave a damn about Malfoy's sex life, mind you.

He scowled at me. "I am _trying_ to make polite conversation, Weasley."

"And _I _am trying to work!" I opened another book, and nearly smashed his fingers with the spine. Damned Seeker reflexes. "So bugger the hell off, would you?"

"Interesting choice of words."

My head snapped up. "What?"

He was smiling like...what was that Muggle picture Hermione liked, Moan Elisa? He was smiling like that and looking at me. "You said, I quote, 'bugger off.' Were you perhaps subconsciously hinting at something?"

Oh, Merlin, not this again. Back before Easter, when his father had sent the Howler, I'd wondered if maybe Malfoy was actually a human being deep down inside, if there was more to him than sex and mind games. Apparently not. "Look, Malfoy, if you're horny, why don't you go find Harry? He's tense."

"Huh?"

"And tell him my sex life is not boring."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

I looked down at the sentence I'd just written: _The roots are extremely dificult to harvest exsept during the new moons in summer because of there speed in ecsess of twenty-five miles and hour and my sex life isn't boring. _

I was doomed.

I buried my face in my hands. I had to concentrate. I had Potions at nine o'clock and eighteen inches to write, but I could make it that far, I could finish this and probably even sleep for a bit beforehand...sleep...god, sleep sounded good right about then...somewhere warm...but I had an essay to finish...not that it couldn't wait a bit...

I jumped when I felt a pair of hands settle on my shoulders. They were strong and confident, and began to systematically knead their way down my spine. I was sore from leaning over the desk and from the wooden chair; the firm pressure felt wonderful on my knotted muscles. It took a few minutes for my brain to kick in. "Malfoy?"

His voice came from somewhere behind me, distinctly distracted. "Mmm-hmmm?"

"Are you rubbing my back?"

He sighed. "No, Weasley, you are under attack by enormous massage-giving spiders." It took me a moment to register the sarcasm, during which time Malfoy gently guided me forward and worked toward the small of my back. I could feel him leaning over me, looming, radiating heat in the cold library. It would've been easy to lean back just a bit and press myself into that warmth, against the contours of his chest. Though we were both wearing a few more clothes than the last time I'd felt his weight on my back, I could still remember it quite clearly, a sharp-edged sense-memory of mixed-up pleasure and pain...

Some kind force in the universe guided my back along my train of thought and show me where I'd derailed. I jumped and jerked away from Malfoy's hands, which had gotten all the way to my waist. "Go find someone else to bother, would you?" I snapped, and groped for my quill.

"What's the matter?" He traced one finger up my spine, triggering a reflexive shiver. "Something wrong with my technique?"

"Sod off, Malfoy."

"There's no need to be rude"

"Sod _off, _damn it!" I stood up and turned on him. "I am _busy_ here, see? I am _working._ I don't have the time or the patience to get dragged into one of your weird evil..._thingies_, not here, not now. If you want is a fuckbuddy, Zabini ought to be waiting for you back in Slytherin. Now leave. Me. _ALONE!"_

He stared at me like I was out of my mind. "Weasley, what debilitating malfunction in your tiny, useless brain could possibly lead you to conclude that a simple backrub is some sort of devious prelude to sex?"

With Malfoy, _anything_ could be a devious prelude to sex, but I didn't feel up to that line of argument. "So you expect me to believe you just randomly decided to give me a backrub out of the goodness of your heart?"

"Is that so hard to believe?"

"Yes."

He scowled. "And why is that?"

"Because you are incapable of being selfless, or generous, or...or _nice_." I sat down and turned my back on him. "It's all about you, and everyone else is just there so you can fuck with them, but you're wrong because some of us are sick of getting fucked with and fucking and...and..." I paused. "Why am I even having this conversation?"

Malfoy leaned against the edge of the table again and started counting on his fingers. "Let's see, I tried to be polite, you were an ass, I rubbed your back, you were an ass again"

"Malfoy, justjust_please,_" I stared at him, "go away. I've got more important things to do."

His face darkened. "Fine." He pushed all my things off the table and stalked out. Bastard.

I turned back to my essay and tried to keep writing. Really, I did. But after Malfoy left it got harder and harder to concentrate, as the candles burned down and the words went in and out of focus. I think I must've read the same paragraph about four times and never understood a word of it; I was so damn tired, and I was cold, and really, a little nap couldn't hurt any. I could keep writing later, but I just had to rest my eyes...for...a bit...

...just...resting...

....mmmm.....

_"Ron!"_

"AAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!" I tumbled out of my chairagainand squinted against the bright daylight seeping through the windows. Oh, shit. Oh, _shit._

"I can't believe you fell asleep down here, honestly. Oh, _why_ didn't you finish this on time? You could at least make an effort to write more neatly..." Hermione kept babbling while Harry helped me scrabble to my feet. I hardly noticed either of them. It was morning, and the essay wasn't finished; it wasn't finished, it wasn't finished, it was...

I heaved myself up on the edge of the table while Hermione continued her tirade.

...it was laying in neat rolls on the tabletop.

The hell?

I seized the last scroll, knocking the rest of them to the floor. The essay was _finished;_ not quite down to the end of the parchement, with all the proper footnotes and everything. Unbelievable. No, actually, _impossible_I didn't remember writing any of it. I skimmed the last few paragraphs, and I realized I didn't even _know_ most of it. So how had it gotten finished?

"Ron, come _on,"_ Hermione seized my arm and started hauling me towards the library doors. "It's nearly nine, if we're not there on time Snape won't even collect our essays and you'll have stayed up all night for nothing."

"I...uh..." I looked to Harry for help, but he just shrugged and handed me my bag. I had insulted him last night, hadn't I? Damn...

Halfway down the entrance hall steps, a thought occurred to me. "Harry?"

"Mmm?"

"Does Dobby know anything about potions?"

He blinked at me.

Hermione sighed impatiently. "Come _on,_ you two, we're going to be late..."

So who finished my essay? I didn't think anybody but Harry and Hermione knew I was even in the library...and Ginny, but Ginny didn't know enough to write an essay like that. Maybe it had finished itself? The scroll had been sitting in the bottom of my bag for a while, who knew what sort of spells it might've absorbed.... I pulled it out of my bag and shook it; it didn't do anything exceptionally un-scroll-like. Still, this _was_ Hogwarts...

I whispered into the end of the scroll. "Hello?"

Harry looked over his shoulder. "Who are you talking to?"

"Er, no one."

So how was my essay finished?

Hermione dragged us into the queue out front of Snape's classroom, with plenty of time to spare. I tried to cover a yawn and poked myself in the face with the scroll. A couple of people laughed at me, but one person _snickered, _and I snapped around to find him as soon as I heard it. Malfoy was parked between Crabbe and Goyle, holding his bag, snickering at me. _Looking_ at me, with this funny expression. Evil weird crazy fucking _bastard!_

"Malfoy!" I charged out of the queue and shoved the last scroll under his nose. "What the hell is this?"

He raised his eyebrows and looked down at it, until he was nearly cross-eyed. "That," he said calmly, "is a scroll, Weasley. People write on them." Crabbe and Goyle laughed at that, like it was fucking _funny_ or something.

"I know what you do with a scroll, Malfoy, now what did you _do_ with it?" I snapped.

He blinked at me. "I don't know. What is it that I'm meant to have done?"

"You wrote on it!"

A few Slytherins started giggling, and Ophelia Nott coughed delicately. Malfoy smirked just a little, though. "Weasley," he said softly, "I should have thought that was _obvious._"

"So you admit it!"

He suddenly switched back to a innocent-and-a-little-confused face. "Apparently. Now what have I admitted to?"

Then suddenly Hermione was tugging on my arm. "Come _on, _Ron, whatever it is, he isn't worth it." And I realized that I couldn't say a damned thing about my essay without admitting I hadn't finished it on my own, which would set Hermione off screaming, not to mention get back to Snape as fast as one of the Slytherins could whisper.

I settled for waving the scroll in Malfoy's face a bit more, and ended up jabbing him rather hard in the upper lip. "I'll get you for this, Malfoy," I hissed. "I swear, whatever it is, I'll get you for it." And went back to my place in the queue with all the Slytherins laughing behind me, and one in particular just snickering. Bastard.

Snape popped around the corner almost immediately and ushered us into the room. I quickly unrolled the scroll and peered at it again: it looked okay, although in terms of the facts it could be complete and utter nonesense and I wouldn't really know. The handwriting even looked like mine, and that _really_ worried me, but I suppose there was some sort of spell for that...but why would he do in the first place?

Snape finished taking the roll much, much faster than usual. He had to've. "Mr. Goyle, Mr. Moon, collect the essays. The rest of you, begin taking down the instructions on the board." I started tying all my scrolls together with a bit of string I found in my bag, but a horrible thought hit me: _what if he hexed the parchement? _He could've, and fixed it so it wouldn't hurt me, but whoever else touched it...I leaned over in my seat and jabbed Seamus with the end of the scroll.

"Ow!" He turned around and glared at me. "What'd you do that for?"

"Um...never mind." But couldn't he have also fixed it so it would only hurt _Snape? _Wouldn't that be perfect, no one would believe I hadn't done it myself...I tore a piece of paper out of my notebook and scribbled on it quickly, _If this essay explodes it is really not my fault and I mean it. Or gives you boils. _I tucked it into the bundle and shoved the whole thing into Moon's arms and put my head on the desk. I was completely doomed.

Hermione poked me with the sharp end of her quill. "Ron, sit _up,_ you can't nap in here!"

"I'm doomed," I told her.

She sniffed. "Quit being melodramatic."

I took notes with everyone else, or tried to, even though my eyes stung and I kept tipping over sideways into Harry. After about twenty minutes, I heard Snape clear his throat. "Mr. Weasley?"

My head snapped up. "I'm sorry, sir."

He raised one eyebrow at me. "What for?"

"Um..." Shit, now I looked guilty.

He let me suffer for a few minutes before calling me up to his desk. When I was standing in front of him he held out a bundle of scrolls. "Mr. Weasley, what is this?"

I looked at the bundle. Was it a trick question? Was he trying to take points from Gryffindor? He usually did that to Harry... "It's, um, scrolls. Sir."

"And what is written on these scroll, Mr. Weasley?" It looked a vein or something was popping up on one side of his forehead.

I examined them closely. "Er...an essay? Sir...?"

"Yes, Mr. Weasley. Specifically, _your_ essay. Now," and he pulled my little note out of the bundle, "what is this?"

Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. "A...a...a note. Sir."

He looked up at me. "Would you care to explain the reasoning behind this little missive?"

"Er..." Once again, my staggering intellect leapt to my rescue. "I don't know."

"You don't know." He examined the note again. "Mr. Weasley, all things considered, I find it difficult to believe that even you could be completely disengaged from your own thought processes while penning such a literary masterpiece as this."

"I didn't write it."

He looked up again. "Mr. Weasley, I saw you write it."

"No you didn't."

His eyes narrowed.

I fixed my eyes on a jar sitting over his desk. "Er, um...what I mean is, um, under the...the circumstances, in this particular situ...situation, that is, there was...there is...are...um...with regards to...to..." By then I was looking at the ceiling, which was luck, because I had to yawn. When I looked down again, I couldn't remember what I'd been talking about. "What was the question?"

He made a sort of snorting noise and crumpled the note in one hand. "Take your seat, Mr. Weasley, or it'll be five points from Gryffindor."

I took my seat. I looked at Malfoy. Malfoy was looking at me. I blinked at him, trying to put it all together, but he smiled before he looked away.

"What'd Snape want?" Harry whispered.

"Er..." I tried to think of a good excuse. "Nothing."

Harry blinked. I wondered if there was some kind of special eye dust going around that made people blink all the time. "...Okay."

Harry looked back at his notes, Hermione hadn't yet looked up from hers, and I looked at Malfoy. He was levitating scraps of parchement across his desk and looking completely bored. But he had finished my essay. He _admitted_ he had. What the hell was he up to?


	13. Kindness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Malfoy has Yet Another Evil Plot. Really.

"Weasley!"

_Oh, dear god._

"Weasley!"

Maybe if I ignored him he'd just sort of go away.

"Have you gone deaf or were you always this stupid?"

Harry looked at me sideways. "Are you waiting for him to go hoarse?"

I clenched my fists around the shoulder strap of my bag. "I was hoping he'd be struck by lightening, actually."

"We're indoors," Hermione said.

"A man can dream."

It wouldn't've been so bad if Malfoy weren't so damn normal about it allinsulting people, flicking his hair, marching around with his nose in the air and the remains of his entourage at his heels. When people were looking, that is. See, apparently my Potions essay had just been the beginning of some twisted, drawn-out plot against me; it was the only good explanation I had for why he was acting schizophrenic. Normal when people were watching, but when they weren't...

"Wease. _LEE."_

Malfoy had actually run to catch up with usa miracle in its own right. Unfortunately I couldn't keep ignoring him when he was practically stepping on the hem of my robes and shrieking in my ear like like a banshee with a hangnail. I stopped and turned around, and tried to look cool and collected and completely not paranoid about the situation. "What do you want, Malfoy?"

He thrust a textbook out at me, holding it by the corner as if it were covered in something icky. (Which it wasn't. Dean had spilled a bottle of ink, is all.) "You left this," he said, sounding all put-out like and grumpy, as if running twenty feet from Fix's classroom had been some kind of marathon and he deserved a medal.

The book didn't look hexed, and I didn't see his wand in easy reach; that didn't mean it was safe. I searched his face, looking for a smirk or a scowl or a sneersome sort of expression beginning with _s_ that I could handle, you know, one that made sense. He looked bored; he looked like he'd rather be anywhere else on the planet than this corridor, in front of me. But he was also watching me just as carefully as I was watching him, with a sort of..._intense_ look, the sort I couldn't really explain. It was like he was waiting for something, or something.

"Give it here, then," I snapped, and tried to snatch my book back as quickly as I could. Not quite quick enough, though; he "accidentally" dropped it, and caught it with his other hand, so that his fingers closed over mine. His hand was warm and dry and he _smiled_ for a split half-secondjust a little, just enough. Then I jerked my arm away and he turned and left, nose in the air, like he hadn't done a thing.

Oh, he was definitely up to something evil.

Harry looked from Malfoy to me to Malfoy, back to me, and then shook his head. "What was that all about?"

"Nothing," I said, and tucked the book under my arm.

"You'd better make sure that's not hexed or something," Hermione said, and reached for her wand.

"Don't bother."

Because the problem was, it wasn't hexed. Just like the Potions essay, and the class notes he owled me when I fell asleep, and the doors he held and the hints he whispered in my ear right before an exam in a voice almost too soft to hear. I was _not_ hallucinating this stuff, and I wasn't being paranoid; Malfoy was out to get me. Had to be. Except I couldn't see what driving me mad would accomplish except...well, driving me mad. Maybe I'd missed something, or maybe he was too mad himself for me to figure it all out. Either way, I was definitely in trouble; I just wished I knew _how_.

Harry obviously didn't get it, though. He looked at me like I was a lunatic. "Ron, why would Malfoy bother to help you out unless he had an ulterior motive?"

If I said, _because it's all part of his nefarious master plan,_ they would've got me committed. I couldn't even prove half the things he'd done. So I said, "Fuck if I know. Maybe he's gone round the twist."

"How do you know it isn't hexed, then?" Hermione said.

I opened the book and rifled through all of the pages. In a way, it would've been nice if I had turned into a fruitbat or something horrible; then the whole thing might've been a big weird prank and I could've ignored it. But nothing happened, so I shoved it back under my arm. "See? Perfectly normal."

Harry blinked. "So what's he playing at?"

"If I knew, don't you think I'd do something about it?"

"You don't think..." Hermione bit her lip, and blushed a bit. "Well, I don't know, but maybe...maybe he's flirting with you?"

Harry and I looked at each other.

"It was just a suggestion," Hermione said, and scowled at us while we laughed.

Harry had to wipe the tears off his glasses. "I thought you said Malfoy was obsessed with me, Hermione."

"I've reconsidered my position."

"So now he's obsessed with Ron?"

"I didn't say he was obsessed with anybody."

I looked down at the book in my arm. "Wish he'd stop acting like it, then."

"You say something, mate?"

"Er...never mind."

It wasn't until we were at lunch that I noticed something important; if I hadn't, a whole bunch of things might've gone differently. Malfoy had given me my Defense Against the Dark Arts bookbut I hadn't brought it to class with me. I didn't even have Defense on Mondays, and anyway I'd thought I lost it, since I couldn't find it during class last Thursday. It wasn't in my dormitory, either, and I'd checked; Hermione didn't believe me and said it was probably under my bed. Harry had said he saw me put it in my bag before Potions that day, though, and

Wait a minute.

I didn't remember most of that classwe'd been doing Amnesia Infusionsbut I thought Malfoy had spent more time loitering near our table than usual. We hadn't even been able to tell him to sod off, since Snape insisted the potion needed to be prepared in silence. Malfoy must've stolen it out of my bag when Harry and I weren't looking and sneaked off with it. He'd probably done all sorts of weird evil things to it, maybe used it for some kind of elaborate spell...

...except he gave it back.

Which was somehow really quite disturbing all by itself.

I had just settled down to thinking about all the ways Malfoy could've violated my poor, innocent textbook when Ginny plopped down across from me with an illegal sort of smirk. "So I heard what you and Allison got up to in the Quidditch stands on Saturday."

Malfoy suddenly didn't matter one jot for anything. "What'd you hear?"

"Don't worry, nothing bad...Eloise Midgen saw you kissing, that's all."

Hermione rolled her eyes. "In that case, I'm surprised it took this long to get back to him."

Harry gave me a little smirk. "Finally underway, then?"

"Er...sure." Because what Midgen _hadn't_ seen couldn't hurt anyone.

Now, don't get me wrong about this, because Allison is wonderful. She's charming and attractive, among her many virtues. Furthermore, I like kissing Allison. Kissing Allison is fun. It's anything more than kissing that's the problem. Oh, it's not like I can't...you know...because I can, easy. Maybe too easy, is the problem, I guess. Because, see, just when things start to get interesting I start to worry about whether or not I really like her, or if she's just going to be another Lisa or Justin or Michael, and worrying about things like that in the middle of interesting things isn't exactly conductive to...further things, if you get my meaning. But it's also pretty damn embarrassing to walk a girl back to her dorms because you suddenly can't decide whether or not you want to have sex with her someday. I don't know how these things happen to me.

"Ron? Hello?"

"Er." I looked around. "What?"

Harry rolled his eyes. "Get your mind out of the gutter, Weasley." Ha. If only he knew. "Quidditch tonight, remember?"

"No, I'd thought I'd skip it and do homework in the library."

Hermione sighed. "Your sarcasm is not appreciated."

"Says who?"

I had to get my books for Herbology; I told Harry and Hermione to meet me in class. Ginny had a free period that afternoon and walked back to Gryffindor with me. When we were away from the Great Hall and mostly alone, she suddenly blurted out, "I'm really glad you like Allison."

"Er..."

"I mean...well, I think you're good with each other."

"...thanks?"

She didn't quite look me in the eye, but she sort of looked sideways, like if she looked straight at me she'd see something she didn't like. "Are you...I mean, do you...about Allison, I mean...I..." She exhaled through her teeth. "Oh, never mind."

"Okay." Where the hell had all this come from, anyway?

I was trying to work out what she'd almost said, when Malfoy suddenly appeared from the stairs behind a tapestry. He'd nicked my textbook and he was plotting against me, which was more than enough to make me suspicious, but this had the kind of timing that can't be an accident. He didn't even belong on that floor, anyway. Malfoy looked both ways down the corridor before plastering a sickly-sweet smile on his face. "Why, hello, Weasel. Weaslette."

"What do you want now?" I asked. If he gave a pair of my own boxers or something this time, I was telling a teacher.

But, no, he just kept smiling like he was on drugs. "Oh, I was just on my way, actually." He gave a fake little bow and held back the corner of the tapestry. "After you."

If Ginny hadn't been there, I would've found out what Malfoy was playing at right away, even if I had to hex it out of him. Hell, if Ginny hadn't been there I probably wouldn've knocked out a few of his teeth just for smiling like thatit was _weird._ Unfortunately, Ginny was there, and before I could do anything she put on her own fake little smile and said "Thank you," and disappeared up the stairs.

I stared after her. Malfoy raised his eyebrows at me, _still_ with the grin. I glared at him and chased after my sister.

"Ginny!" Damn, but she could climb stairs fast. "Ginny, what the hell was that about?"

"He was holding the tapestry for us."

"It was _Malfoy!"_

"What does it matter if it was the Muggle Prime Minister?"

"Because! It's Malfoy!"

She rolled her eyes at me. "He was being nice, for once in his lifetime. We might as well take advantage of it."

What part of _that was Malfoy_ did she not understand? "Ginny, why should Malfoy be nice to us, eh? He's got to be plotting something."

Of course, she didn't know what I knew, so she looked at me like I was an idiot. "Or maybe he found Buddha dancing in his cauldron and decided to reform himself, give all his money to charity, and adopt a kitten."

"Eat the kitten, is more like it." I pushed through the invisible door at the top of the stairs. "And what's this Booda bloke got to do with it?"

"Do you pay any attention in Muggle Studies?"

She was changing the subject! "Yes, but we're talking about Malfoy."

"Look," she said, "Malfoy's being nice. Who cares why he's doing it, so long as he is?"

"Because he's Malfoy!"

"If Susan Bones had held the tapestry for us, would you be like this?"

"'Course not. She's not evil."

"But either way, the tapestry still got held."

"What's your point?"

She sighed. "No wonder Hermione broke up with you."

"Gee, thanks, Gin."

We stopped outside the Fat Lady's portrait, and she leaned against the wall. "Think of it this way," she said. "If someone does something that benefits you, he could do it for good reasons or bad reasons or crazy reasons. That doesn't change the fact that you benefited, right?"

"Yes, it does."

"How?"

"...it just does!"

The Fat Lady cleared her throat significantly. Ginny shook her head and gave the password, and we both went inside.

Ginny had obviously spent too much time around Luna Lovegood, so I didn't think of the whole mess again until after Quidditch practice. The rest of the team nominated me to take the balls back to the broomshed when I wasn't paying attention; Harry, being the wonderful and considerate friend that he is, shoved the Snitch in my hand and ran off as soon as he could. I managed to get the Bludgers and Quaffle back into the crate single-handedly without killing myself (which I think ought to earn me some kind of award) and levitated it to the shed. The moment I stepped inside, though, I saw the last thing I would've expected or wanted to be there: Malfoy, crawling around on the ground, peering under the racks of school brooms. He looked almost comical, on all fours, squinting into the shadows and with his arse stuck up in the air, so that his robes sort of flowed over it, and damn it, I had a girlfriend, I wasn't supposed to be looking...

He scrambled to his feet, and noticed me, staring like an idiot. He scowled. "What are you doing in here, Weasel?"

"I'd ask you the same question, Malfoy."

He folded his arms and glared at me like he wasn't covered in dirt and dust. "It's none of your business."

"Were you spying on us?" He could've picked a lot better places to do it from than the shed, of course, but anything's possible with him.

But he rolled his eyes and snorted. "Yes, Weasley. My life has no meaning except in relation to yours. I spend my every waking moment plotting how to torment you endlessly."

"That sounds about right."

He scowled. "I was being sarcastic, you fool."

"I wasn't."

His eyes bugged out as I steered the crate of balls into its usual spot on the floor. "If you truly believe that, you are even more inconceivably ignorant than I previously believed."

"Do you remember anything of the last the last six months, Malfoy?"

He dismissed it all with a wave of his hand. "Ancient history."

He was insane. Evil, and insane, no matter how perfect his arse was. "So what about the last two weeks, then? Doesn't that count?"

He raised his eyebrows at me, "Oh, you mean all the many selfless acts of kindness I've committed on your behalf?"

"Is that what you thought they were?"

"That _is_ what they were." I rolled my eyes, and he smirked. "Your sister apparently believes it."

"She doesn't know you like I do."

"How do you mean?" And all of a sudden he was much too close and staring much too hard and reaching out towards me with one dirty hand. "In the Biblical sense?"

I swallowed, hard. _I have a girlfriend. I have a girlfriend. IhaveagirlfriendIhaveagirlfriendIhave_

I planted my broomstick between us and he froze a good three feet away with a nasty look in his eye. Gryffindor scores. "What about the textbook?" I demanded.

His scowl only got deeper. "The what?"

"My Defense book," I said, "the one you nicked from me and gave back. You call that an act of kindness?"

"I most certainly did not 'nick' anything of yours," he snapped.

"Then how'd you get ahold of it?"

"I found it."

"Where?"

"Snape's dungeon."

"Prove it," I told him.

His upper lip curled perfectly into a sneer. "How?"

My jaw was clenched so hard my teeth ached, and I stared at the floor. It was possible. For anyone else, in fact, it was likely. It _could_ have fallen out of my baghe _might _have just picked it up off the floorbutwell"What are you playing at, Malfoy?"

"Whatever do you mean?"

"I mean..." I groped for the words. _Are you plotting against me?_ didn't sound exactly right. "...why?"

That sneer melted into a sharp little smile that was somehow almost worse. "Precisely because you don't think I can."

No. It couldn't be that simple. Could it? "You mean...this whole thing...was just for the hell of it? Just for the...perverse...whatever?"

"No, Weasley." His smile got bigger. "It was just too easy to drive you crazy."

...that son of a _bitch._

I left. I couldn't be in that building anymore, not without injuring someone. Preferably Malfoy, though really, it was mostly my faultmy fault for letting him get to me, for caring, for missing something so fucking obvious when I _knew_ he had some kind of plot...I couldn't believe I'd been such a fool. I couldn't believe I'd let him _win._

"Oh, Weasley?" he yelled from behind me.

"What the fuck do you" Malfoy chucked something at me, which hit me in the chest and fell down. Without taken my eye off him, I picked it up. It was dusty, dirty and covered in cobwebs. It was a plug.

"You lost that, too."

Take that back, it's _all_ Malfoy's fucking fault.

I went back to Gryffindor and just about scared the crap out of Harry, who was doing homework on his bed. I slammed the door, threw my broom and started changing out of my Quidditch robes. "What's the matter with you?"

"Nothing."

"What took you so long getting back?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing's been busy then."

"Shu" I bit my tongue. Not another row with him, not now. "Not right now, okay?"

He stood up and put my broom on the bed. "You want to tell me what's got you so wound up, mate?"

Malfoy had, but only because I let him. I played right into his pale little girl hands and let him fuck with me and control me and use me. Again. But not anymore. The little ferret could go off and do whatever the hell he wanted, as long as it didn't involve me in any way, shape or form. From now on, I no longer cared.

I looked Harry right in the eye and told him honestly, "Absolutely nothing."


	14. Honesty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ron thinks, Draco doesn't exist, and a question is posed.

It ought to be pretty easy to ignore someone, if you really put your mind to it. Take Malfoy for example: we were hardly ever on the same floor of the castle, much less in the same room, so there wasn't much to ignore. Or at least, there shouldn't have been. And when I couldn't avoid him, I could've just, you know, read something, or thought about Quidditch, or even listened to the teacher. Theoretically. I mean, it should've been easy as pie.

And yet, I was still in detention with him on a Friday night.

I don't know how these things happen to me.

Madam Pince stuck her head around the corner of the shelf, and apparently decided we weren't progressing fast enough. "You have half an hour left," she announced. I just nodded, because she'd put a Silencing Spell on us both the moment we walked in, "as a precaution." Bitch. I saw Malfoy nod out of the corner of my eye, and then he "accidentally" bumped into me for about the seventieth time. Git.

Pince had us reshelving books by hand, which probably counted as cruel and unusual punishment in some country. I'd have asked Hermione, but she thought it made sense: _"Some of those volumes are very delicate, and they've got a lot of Preservation Charms on them. Just Banishing them back to their place might cause all sorts of problems...and you _did_ knock them over."_ Except I wouldn't have run into the bloody shelves if Malfoy hadn't been following me around the library in the first place, like some kind of...thing that follows people, and insults their girlfriends. And is also crazy and evil.

And bumps into you on purpose seventy-one times in two hours.

I turned around to glare at him. He smiled at me. Not a creepy fake smile, and not a nasty git smile, but a sort of crazy smile, like a talking purple penguin had just crowned him king of the midget people. There were dark circles under his eyes, as if he didn't look enough like a vampire normally. It seemed like every time I turned around he was smiling like that, and following me around, and just generally trying to drive me mad. Oh, not like he'd been trying before, with the randomly being nice when no one was looking. Now he was just trying to do it any way he possibly could. Hence the following me around, and the remarks about Allison, and the genera nastiness, and hence why I'd tried to set his teeth on fire. I was ignoring him, though, and detention or not I think I was ignoring him pretty well. He just couldn't take the hint.

I dropped into a crouch to stack books on a low shelf. Malfoy bumped into me. Again. I turned around (again) but for the first time in a fortnight, he wasn't smiling. He was jumping on me instead. I threw my arms up, but I was too off-balance to stop him; the next thing I knew I was flat on my back and he was on top of me, straddling my waist. I tried to yell, but of course, we were both Silenced. Besides, Madam Pince was exactly the last person I wanted to walk in on something like this.

(Except there wasn't any "something" because I was supposed to be ignoring him...)

He kissed me, with his tongue in my mouth and our teeth banging together, and it was fireworks, cinnamon and wintergreen together. He looked like a zombie but his body was warm and alive, and rubbed against me in all the right places, so suddenly it didn't matter if I was sore all over from lifting spellbooks, because there were other things to feel that were infintely more important. But there was also something...I can't even explain it now. It was huge, and weird, and it was just suddenly there, like background noise or a funny smell. It was more than his mouth or his hands or his weight or his warmth, but it was all of that stuff, and I couldn't name it or pin it down. The best I could do was lean into it and guess, and so I did.

I felt him moan, in his chest and in his throat, but the spell blocked it out. The only sounds were our clothes and breath and the floorboards creaking; a bit strange, really. He dropped his mouth to my neck and I tilted my head back and god, it felt amazing, his lips and teeth and tongue on that spot just above my pulse...but there was still something more I couldn't quite place...

And then Madam Pince ruined the whole damn thing by shrieking.

Malfoy jumped off me with a glass-eyed stare and I just sat there like an idiot. Pince was looking a bit dazed herself, like somebody'd clubbed her from behind with a broomstick. "You may go," she said, but she was looking over both our heads and to the left, and her face was flushed.

I jumped to my feet and bolted out of the library. I wasn't really thinking; or if I was, it wasn't anything but _Ohshitohshitohshitohshitohshit._ I wasn't supposed to snog Malfoy; I wasn't even supposed to pay attention to Malfoy; Malfoy, for my purposes, didn't exist. I was dating Allison, she was a good person and just because I didn't like her didn't mean I had the right to go around snogging other people, even ones that didn't exist.

Except I _did_ like her, because Allison was great. She was smart and funny and pretty and everyone I knew liked her. She was just...boring. But that was my own damn fault; we never did much more than kiss, because I was freaked out every time we got closer. If I could just calm down for once it'd be just fine. Anyway, I only freaked out with her because I didn't want to ruin things between us, because things were going good, even if I was bored (though I really wasn't). I didn't freak out with Malfoy because I knew it was all just sex and there wasn't anything to ruin. And plus he doesn't exist, so there's nothing to freak out over.

_But if Malfoy doesn't exist, who just jumped you in front of Pince?_

Damn it.

It'd been two weeks that I'd ignored him. Two weeks of class and Quidditch and Allison and everything except him. Two weeks I'd been happy...and bloody bored. Except I wasn't, because I had classes and Quidditch and Allison, and anyway nobody in their right mind should miss Malfoy's sparkling personality. I certainly didn't miss being insulted and yelled at and tripped and tricked and used...except, in the library yesterday, when he'd been following me around close enough to breathe on the back of my neck, and he _looked_ at me like there were rules and somehow I'd been cheating...

Damn it all the _hell_, I didn't need to be thinking about this!

I got back to the Fat Lady's portrait and tried to give her the password. That was when I realized the Pince hadn't given back my voice. "No password, no entry" was all the damn painting would say, even when I tried to make see the problem. Well, of course she could say that, she was a bloody portrait; there weren't any non-existant people sneaking around the corridors who wanted to bump into her and possibly make her think. I tried to sort of gesture the password, like sign language, except I don't know how you'd even start to gesture out _dickcissel _without offending anyone. I ended up just kicking the bottom of the frame.

"That was uncalled for, young man!"

I gestured back my response, and she left the painting entirely. _Damn_ it!

I don't know how long I was waiting out there before Hermione came through the portrait hole and found me. "Ron! Where have you been? You were supposed to be out of detention ages ago, Harry and I werewhat are you doing?"

I pushed into the Common Room, grabbed the nearest quill and parchment, and wrote out the counterspell for her. She blinked at it for a moment before she cried "Oh!" and actually cast it. It felt like a load of lint coming loose in my throat, and I coughed for a good minute. Stupid Pince.

Harry offered me his chair, and then he and Hermione both sat down right opposite me, so it felt a bit like I was on trial or something. "Was it that bad?" Harry asked.

_Depends on your definition of "bad."_ "Not really. Just boring as hell."

We stared at each other for a moment.

"Er..."

"What?"

"Allison was looking for you earlier."

Oh, shit. "When was this?"

"While you were in detention," Hermione said, "I think...well, she said she needed to talk to you."

Brilliant. I sank back in my chair. "She's pissed about what Malfoy said yesterday."

"There have been other rumors..."

"Yeah, and Malfoy started them!"

"Ron," Harry said, and it was his don't-fuck-with-me-I'm-the-hero voice. "I don't believe a word Malfoy or anyone else says about you, right? But...you've been acting weird lately."

Like he's really someone to go around setting standards of normal. "What d'you mean, weird?"

"He means _restless,_" Hermione said, although from the look Harry gave her I'm not that's what he meant at all. "I've noticed it too, and so has Ginny."

"Forget Ginny." I glanced around the common room; a bunch of fifth-years were studying together, but I didn't see her with them. "Where is she, anyway?"

"That's not important," Hermione said, "Ron, we're worried about you."

"Well, you can stop worrying, because nothing's wrong!"

"There's no need to get upset..."

"Why not?" I asked, probably louder than necessary. "You're only asking me whether I cheat on my girlfriend with a transsexual banshee!"

"We are not, now keep your voice down!" Harry snapped.

Hermione went all warm and fuzzy on me. "Ron, we didn't meant to imply anything. Those rumors are ridiculous, and we know you'd never do anything like that, even if it were possible, which I don't think it is anyway. But we _are_ worried about you....is there anything you want to talk about?"

I shut my eyes. _Well, let's see, I have some kind of paranoid thinking disorder about my girlfriend, I haven't had sex since January, Draco Malfoy is stalking me and yet I'm still strangely attracted to him. Oh, I forgot to tell you we shagged, didn't I? Among other things. _"Nope, not a thing."

Hermione started to say something, but Harry cut her off. He blurted out "In that case, would you have a look at my broom, I think there's something wrong with it," and all but dragged me up the stair to our dormitory. Subtle as a punch in the stomach, that one.

"What's the crisis, mate?" I asked once he'd got the door shut.

He looked at me, with that I-know-when-you-are-bullshitting-and-now-is-not-the-time look. "Do you like Allison?"

"What the hell sort of question is that?"

"Just answer, please."

"Allison's great, Harry. She's the best thing that's happened to me all year."

"But do you like her?"

"I"

It was weird, like my throat had closed up, or my brain had jammed. I could think it easily enough, and I could say the words by themselves, but stringing them together...

"Be honest, Ron," Harry said.

"I...er..."

Three words. It was easy. What the hell was the matter with me?

Harry sighed like I'd said something. "Look," he said, "I can't speak for anyone else, but I won't hold it against you if you break up with her."

"I don't want to break up with her!"

"That's obvious," he muttered, and rolled his eyes.

"Then why...you...oh, forget it." I didn't want to talk about this anymore, I didn't want to _think_ about this anymore. I turned around and put my hand on the doorknob.

"...Ron?"

I spun back around. "What?"

He was staring at the collar of my robes, and frowning. "Is that a hickey?"

I didn't have to ask, or check in a mirror; I knew there would be a bright strawberry mark on the side of my neck where Malfoy had bitten me. It wasn't my fault. But I couldn't tell Harry that, because I hadn't told him about the evil plot, or the other plot, or what had happened in Hogsmeade...but I couldn't lie to him, either, not when he was looking at me with suspicion in his eyes, like he didn't want to trust me.

"I have to go," I said, and ran.

The right thing to do would've been to go find Allison and talk to her. I could've convinced her that the rumors were bullshit, and kissed her, and we could've...what did Hermione always say? Live happily after forever? Something like that. I could've done all that, and been okay, except I'd snogged Malfoy in the library and had a hickey on my neck. So instead I went running straight out of Gryffindor and didn't stop until I got onto the grounds, where I could breath a little.

I. Liked. Allison. There, I'd thought it. Could I say it? "I..." _Be honest,_ Harry'd said...I liked being around Allison. I liked talking to Allison. Allison liked mebut that wasn't the point. I was dating her, so I had to like her, because if I didn't like her there'd be no point in dating her at all. So I did like her. I had to like her. Right?

I sat down by the edge of the lake and chucked a rock in, just to hear the splash. There certainly wasn't any reason not to like Allison. I wouldn't even have been worrying about all this if Harry hadn't brought it up...and he only brought it up because of those stupid rumors. Rumors Malfoy had started. It was bad enough what he was saying about me, of course, but the shit he was saying about her was downright disgusting. Probably not physically possible, either, but I wasn't entirely sure. But he'd spread it all over the school, just to get to me...Allison didn't deserve that. Even if I didn't like her.

Which I did.

Maybe.

"Hello, Weasel."

The trouble with grass is that you can't hear anyone coming until it's too late. Malfoy seemed to just appear out of nowhere; if Hermione wouldn't've had killed me for thinking it, I'd've guessed he'd Apparated. "What d'you want now?" I asked, with my hand on my wand.

He was smiling again, mad as ever. "Care to finish what we started in the library?"

"We didn't start anything."

He crouched down next to me so he was practically breathing in my ear. "Don't try to tell me that you weren't involved in that little tete-a-tete."

"You started it."

"You didn't stop it."

I scrambled to my feet. "Sod, off Malfoy. I don't have time for this."

"Oh, no," he said, and grabbed my sleeve. He pulled too close, so we were practically toe to toe. "No, this time you're not running away, not again."

"Get off me."

"You can't hide from me forever, Weasel."

"I'm not hiding!"

He grinned, or grimaced. "What else are skanky little halfbloods good for?"

I jerked away from him, but I felt a seam split in my robes. I brought my wand up, tip to tip with Malfoy's. "Take. That. Back."

"Does she give good head, at least?"

"Shut up."

"I hope you don't have to reciprocate."

"Shut the fuck up!"

"Can't be much fun in the sack, with tits that small"

It had to be a Seeker thing, that he could dodge it; I don't even remember what curse I used, but it exploded in steam on the lake. "You shut up about my girlfriend!"

"Oh, is that what you call her?"

"What do you mean?"

Malfoy took a step away, still grinning like a crazy person, but his voice was shaking with...anger? "She doesn't _love_ you, Weasley. She doesn't give a _damn_ about you. She's using you, fooling youprobably just wants to get closer to Potter"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"The bitch you call a girlfriend!"

"You don't know a damned thing about her!"

"I know enough!"

This was about the point yesterday when we'd knocked over the shelves. But there was nothing to knock over here and no one to stop us; just us, and our wands, and the dark lake. And something had finally occurred to me. "Why the hell does it matter, Malfoy?"

"Because sheyoubecause" He shook his wand at me like he was scolding a dog. "You're trying to change the subject!"

"You're avoiding the question."

"The question's ridiculous!"

"What are you playing at?" I advanced on him, until we'd nearly cross wands trying to cast any curses. "Why drag her into it at all? If you're just trying to piss me off"

He rolled his eyes. "Oh, yes, Weasley, because everything's about _you_."

"Then what do have against her?"

"She's a scheming little bint!"

"How do you know?"

"She's certainly had you fooled, not that that's difficult..."

It was something fell into place, a long way away. It was ridiculous. It was impossible. It just didn't make sense. But it also made perfect sense...which is about as much sense as anything makes with Malfoy. "Are you jealous?"

He snorted aloud, several times. "Weasley, that's got to rank easily among the stupidest questions on the history of the planet."

"You didn't answer it."

"It's absurd!"

"Then go ahead and say it!"

"Why on Earth should I be jealous of some common, ignorant, over-sexed, trecherous slut, just because you'd rather waste your time following her around like a trained monkey on a lead?"

"I don't follow her anywhere"

"Oh, yes you do!" He was practically shrieking, and his eyes were bugging out of his head. "You're at her bloody beck and call, always there, always _eager._ It's_ sick_. You're a fucking pureblood wizard, _debasing_ yourself for that half-Muggle _trash, _when _I_ could give you...I...I mean...you..."

_Oh, holy shit._

His face fell, into something like panic. I should've ignored it. I should've blown his head off for being evil or walked away. It's a simple enough choice. But Harry, Harry wanted me to be honest, and for it all to make sense I had to know...

"Malfoy...you don't..._fancy_ me, do you?"

He stared at me for about three seconds and then ran for it.

I dropped back down onto the grass and stared after him, long after he was out of sight. Absolutely raving, he was. Had to be. It shouldn't have made a damn bit of difference anyway. Excepted when he was on top of me, and we moved together, and there was that big strange unnamable _something..._

Be honest, Harry'd said.

"I...am completely fucked." My life couldn't possibly get any worse than this.


	15. Fade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The question gets answered.

There are times when I think my life can't possible get any worse than it already is. That's usually right before it does.

Neville came into the dormitory, and very nearly ran back out. I lay on my bed, staring at the canopy, which was bloody boring but better than nothing. "Hello, Neville," I said.

"Er...hello, Ron." He apparently decided I wasn't going to jump on him, and slipped inside.

I watched him dart over to his bed and start rooting around underneath. "Don't ever have sex, Neville," I told him.

He cracked his head on the bed frame and leapt to his feet. "We haven't!" he yelped.

"It only complicates things."

"Er..."

"I think I'm going to become a monk."

Neville stared at me. I stared at the canopy.

"Ron?"

"Hmm?"

"Why are you going to become a monk?"

"Celibacy."

"Ah."

It stopped raining outside.

"This has nothing to do with Ginny, then?"

I looked up. "'Course not."

"Oh! Oh...well...of course. Not. I mean, I knew that."

Crazy sod. "You know why else I'm becoming a monk?"

"...why?"

"Vow of silence."

"Er."

I had told Harry. I had told Hermione. They hadn't screamed at mewhich was a miracle worthy of sainthood for someonebut they weren't happy. Oh, no, they weren't happy at all. I'd told them everything I'd done (well,more like edited highlights) since last summer, more or less, including Malfoy and all his various evil plots. I suppose it could've been worse, like if I'd lied to them (which I _hadn't_,and Harry could stuff it) but it could've gone better. I just hadn't been able to make them _understand, _was the problem; I kept repeating myself and trying to explain they'd still stare at me like I was a lunatic.

_"But it's _Malfoy!_"_

"I thought I'd said that already."

"How could you?"

"The usual way, mostly."

"Not funny, Ron."

"Ron, you hate Malfoy."

"'Course I do."

"So how could you...be with him, like that, if you hate him?"

"..."

"Ron?"

"...it's Malfoy_."_

You know, maybe I am a lunatic.

Neville cleared his throat and looked at his watch. "Er...d'you know where Hermione is?"

"She's not speaking to me."

"D'you think Harry does?"

"Neither is he."

"Er."

I had broken up with Allison, too, which was even worse. I'd been dumped so often by so many people that I'd thought it would be easy, but when I tried to tell her she looked so confused, and unhappy...and then she punched me in the stomach. Oh, not hard; and anyway, I deserved it. But still...Harry and Hermione weren't happy with me, but they'd come aroundthat I could count on. Allison was probably going to hold this against me the rest of her life. Trouble was, I think I deserved that, too.

I rolled off my bed and stretched. "I'm going to take a walk," I announced to the room.

Neville was still looking at me oddly. "Are you sure you're, well, okay? With everything?"

I snorted. "Mate, I'm not sure if I'm okay with anything." For some reason, that made him turn absolutely white.

I stomped down to the stairs because I felt like it and met Ginny in the common room. She seemed nervous. "Where are you going?"

"I'm taking a walk."

"You didn't, er, happen to see Neville upstairs, did you?"

"'Course I did, we share a room."

"Then you're okay? With us?"

What the hell was she talking about? "Sure. Fine. You're both peachy."

She jumped up and hugged me around the neck with the biggest, dumbest grin I'd ever seen on her. She yelled "Oh, thank you so much!" and then she ran up the boys' staircase.

...or maybe everyone else is a lunatic and _I'm_ sane.

I tried to take a nice, relaxing walk around the lake, but I ran into Justin and Michael coming the other direction. I tried to have a nice, relaxing walk around the Quidditch pitch, but Lisa Turpin and Zacharias Smith were up in the stands. I resolved to have a nice, relaxing walk somewhere, but it started to rain again, at which point I decided to damn the whole thing and sulk.

I ended up at the greenhouses, sitting on a potting bench beneath the eaves. It wasn't raining terribly hard, just enough to get you soaking and make things go foggy at a distance. I huddled in my cloak and stared at the drops falling off the roof of the greenhouse. Harry had told me to be honest, and I had, however much good it'd done me.My friends were angry with me, I had no girlfriend, and Ginny would probably have a fit as soon as she quit acting like a bloody lunatic. Maybe I deserved all of it, though...maybe now I could just start over. Put the past in the past and look ahead and get over it all and forget the past ten months.

Well, most of them. Some bits I'd like to keep.

I heard a funny sort of squishing sound on the grass, and suddenly Malfoy came around the corner of the greenhouse. He was soaking wet; he still looked slightly less alive than normal, but he wasn't smiling, which was a significant improvement. "Not necessarily," he announced.

"Excuse me?"

He tried flick a tangle of hair out of his eyes. "You asked me a question. That's my answer."

I stared at him. It couldn't be. He was crazy, remember? "Not...necessarily?"

"That's what I just said." He rolled his eyes but then went back to staring at me.

I said the first thing than could force itself out of my mouth. "It took you two days to come up with 'not necessarily?'"

"Shut up, Weasley."

He sat down on the bend next to me and pushed his hair out of his face. He must've been walking around the grounds for ages, and what kind of an idiot doesn't wear a cloak? Rainwater dripped down his face and neck, into the collar of his robes, and licked a droplet off his upper lip.

"This doesn't mean I like you," he added.

"Feeling's mutual."

He stared at me. I stared at a tree.

We sat next to one another for ages on the stupid bench, and it kept raining, and everything else just sort of hung there. He shifted closer to me. I shifted away. He examined his nails. I shifted closer. I tried to stretch my arms, and he scooted all the way to the end of the bench and glared at me; once I'd crossed them again, he came back, closer than before.

"I'm still not going to put up with the pureblood bullshit of yours," I said in the general direction of the tree.

He snorted. "Don't expect to be seen with me in public."

"What makes you think I'd want to?"

"And I'm not going to be nice to those..._friends_ of yours."

"Same here."

"Mmm."

I felt him staring at me. He was dripping on my cloak. I looked at the tree and the grass, and the castle and the rain clouds up above; when I finally looked at Malfoy, I couldn't quite stop. There weren't any fireworks and cinnamon when we kissed, just cold rain, wintergreen, and that funny indescribable feeling that was bigger than us both.

"You're dripping on me," I muttered.

He growled. "Shut up, Weasel."

It rained the rest of the afternoon.


End file.
